Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Soul

Datum: 19.1.2024
Time: 16:30–18

Event Label: Lecture
Organisational Units: Art Theory and Cultural Studies

Location Address (1): Schillerplatz 3
Location ZIP and/or City (1): 1010 Vienna
Location Room (1): M20

Inaugural lecture by Joshua Simon, impulse professorship at IKW 2023/24

Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes' [em]Leviathan[/em], by Abraham Bosse, with creative input from Thomas Hobbes who commissioned it and paid for it, 1651[br]Chihuahua/Blueberry muffin? AI machine learning binary classification perception algorithm test/meme, Karen Zack, 2016

Artificial Intelligence does not exist. This talk will consider Artificial Intelligence as a political metaphor and social machine. The origins of AI can be found in Thomas Hobbes’s notion of the Artificial Soul – a construct he devises - a political metaphor and social machine - to describe the sovereign of the state in his Leviathan (1651).

The talk will look at the ways in which the shift between the two terms defines a change and a continuation in our understanding of politics, labour, sovereignty and technology.

Joshua Simon is a curator and writer. He is the author of Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013) and the editor of Being Together Precedes Being: A Textbook for The Kids Want Communism (Archive Books, 2019), among others. Recent curatorial projects include In The Liquid at PrintScreen New Media Festival (2018), The Dividual at Leuphana University Kunstraum in Lüneburg (2021) and Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (2022), and the upcoming Slime program at Secession, Vienna (2024).

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