Bogna Konior
https://linktr.ee/bognamk
@bognamk
I'm after the thing that comes after us.
angelic erotic internet + technology in east europe and east asia + technology and philosophy / theology
Bogna Konior is Assistant Professor at the Interactive Media Arts department, and co-director of AI & Culture Center at NYU Shanghai. In 2023, she is a Research Fellow in the Antikythera Program on Speculative Computation at the Berggruen Institute, and a mentor in the Synthetic Intelligence program at Medialab-Matadero Madrid. Her work on digital culture, philosophy of new media, and posthumanism has been presented internationally, recently including the Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, e-flux, and the Ljubljana Biennale. She is the author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Flugschriften, 2019). With Benjamin Bratton and Anna Greenspan, she is the co-editor of Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of AI, forthcoming from Urbanomic. She is working on two projects concerned with long-term trajectories of technological development. Her current academic project is on Polish science fiction writer and philosopher, Stanislaw Lem, and his neglected contribution to the theory of biotechnological evolution of autonomous reason. She is also working on a multimedia research project on female Catholic mysticism as an early form of cyberfeminism and a predictor of machine erotics, nonhuman personhood, and artificial reproduction. Follow her @bognamk
@bognamk
I'm after the thing that comes after us.
angelic erotic internet + technology in east europe and east asia + technology and philosophy / theology
Bogna Konior is Assistant Professor at the Interactive Media Arts department, and co-director of AI & Culture Center at NYU Shanghai. In 2023, she is a Research Fellow in the Antikythera Program on Speculative Computation at the Berggruen Institute, and a mentor in the Synthetic Intelligence program at Medialab-Matadero Madrid. Her work on digital culture, philosophy of new media, and posthumanism has been presented internationally, recently including the Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, e-flux, and the Ljubljana Biennale. She is the author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Flugschriften, 2019). With Benjamin Bratton and Anna Greenspan, she is the co-editor of Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of AI, forthcoming from Urbanomic. She is working on two projects concerned with long-term trajectories of technological development. Her current academic project is on Polish science fiction writer and philosopher, Stanislaw Lem, and his neglected contribution to the theory of biotechnological evolution of autonomous reason. She is also working on a multimedia research project on female Catholic mysticism as an early form of cyberfeminism and a predictor of machine erotics, nonhuman personhood, and artificial reproduction. Follow her @bognamk
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RECENT by Bogna Konior
As debates around artificial intelligence discourses beyond the West draw
increased attention in media and technology studies, Eastern Europe
remains a neglected territory. Due to only recent entry of Eastern European
scholars into a discipline formalized in the United States in the 1970s, and
because of constraints on intellectuals and scientists under Soviet rule,
debates in Eastern Europe that prefigure some of the contemporary
discussions in media studies are often unknown. In this chapter, looking to
expand the canon of media theory and philosophy, I investigate the
allusions to AI in Summa Technologiae, a unique work at the intersection of
philosophy and popular science published in 1964 by Polish intellectual
and science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem. Though neither ‘artificial
intelligence’ nor ‘media studies’ were established terms at the time, Lem’s
futurology, focusing on the relationship of technology to human cognitive
capacities and evolutionary trajectories, anticipates discussions around
possible models of AI. I introduce Summa and contextualize it within the
Polish intellectual scene at the time, which uniquely combined Catholic
theology with cybernetics. I also put forth my reading of Lem’s imagination
of AI as a ‘gnostic machine:’ an evolutionary, existential technology that
operates at the limit of human comprehension.
ENV/TECH by Bogna Konior
Abstract: This article considers ‘perspectivism’ as described by Viveiros de Castro and Willerslev as a lens for discussing interspecies media arts. In what way could we think about ‘personhood’ in order for the proposition of ‘nonhuman persons’ to make sense, while escaping the determinism of colloquial anthropomorphism, where humans simply project some idea of themselves onto others? How could this in turn inform our interpretation of interspecies art in urban spaces? The ethically controversial art of Japanese collective Chim↑Pom, who break into Fukushima ‘no-go’ zones, capture and kill rats, and lure flock of scavenger crows out of their hiding spots, creates situations where humans and animals relate to each other within a predatory loop of damage and toxicity; a perspectivism for the era of urban waste. The article further raises questions about the historical context of these artworks: post-nuclear spaces, alien and invasive species, and ‘the Anthropocene.’ Unlike stereotypical ‘green art,’ Chim↑Pom’s work grasps human-animal relationships through the lens of animosity, where personalisation and ethics are rooted in conflict. Reading their art through an unusual parallel with animist hunting practices that form the basis of ‘traditional’ perspectivism, the article reflects on these asymmetrically related but proximate frameworks and the current revival of scholarly interest in animism.
Message me for author's copy if needed.]
What is climate fiction? Humanities quarrel over the nature of this newly christened genre, pointing to its activist dimensions and pondering its relationship to realism. In this article, I discuss how digital media studies should enter this debate by analyzing climate simulations as a type of climate fiction, one that lies at the core of any subsequent narrative retellings. The status of climate change itself as a simulation signals that by relegating ‘climate fiction’ to a genre, we miss the opportunity to address the larger net of our climate episteme, where fiction operates on multiple levels. I draw parallels between simulated social scenarios in cli fi and simulated scientific scenarios in climate models, and discuss how climate models are like petri dishes for growing fictional Earths in. Rather than cli fi being a ‘retelling’ of what is knowable through ‘climate data,’ I describe how digital climate simulations rely on creating artificial Earths that are worlds unto themselves. It is both through cultural and scientific climate fictions that we model future scenarios. This modelling, a type of ‘fiction’ is in fact the dominant mode of realism with regards to climate change.
FEM/ TƎCH by Bogna Konior
Online: http://www.ah-journal.net/issues/01/aspirational-entropy-on-post-soviet-cyberfeminism-and-the-geo-political-freeze-frame
MEDIA/PHILOSOPHY by Bogna Konior
As debates around artificial intelligence discourses beyond the West draw
increased attention in media and technology studies, Eastern Europe
remains a neglected territory. Due to only recent entry of Eastern European
scholars into a discipline formalized in the United States in the 1970s, and
because of constraints on intellectuals and scientists under Soviet rule,
debates in Eastern Europe that prefigure some of the contemporary
discussions in media studies are often unknown. In this chapter, looking to
expand the canon of media theory and philosophy, I investigate the
allusions to AI in Summa Technologiae, a unique work at the intersection of
philosophy and popular science published in 1964 by Polish intellectual
and science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem. Though neither ‘artificial
intelligence’ nor ‘media studies’ were established terms at the time, Lem’s
futurology, focusing on the relationship of technology to human cognitive
capacities and evolutionary trajectories, anticipates discussions around
possible models of AI. I introduce Summa and contextualize it within the
Polish intellectual scene at the time, which uniquely combined Catholic
theology with cybernetics. I also put forth my reading of Lem’s imagination
of AI as a ‘gnostic machine:’ an evolutionary, existential technology that
operates at the limit of human comprehension.
Abstract: This article considers ‘perspectivism’ as described by Viveiros de Castro and Willerslev as a lens for discussing interspecies media arts. In what way could we think about ‘personhood’ in order for the proposition of ‘nonhuman persons’ to make sense, while escaping the determinism of colloquial anthropomorphism, where humans simply project some idea of themselves onto others? How could this in turn inform our interpretation of interspecies art in urban spaces? The ethically controversial art of Japanese collective Chim↑Pom, who break into Fukushima ‘no-go’ zones, capture and kill rats, and lure flock of scavenger crows out of their hiding spots, creates situations where humans and animals relate to each other within a predatory loop of damage and toxicity; a perspectivism for the era of urban waste. The article further raises questions about the historical context of these artworks: post-nuclear spaces, alien and invasive species, and ‘the Anthropocene.’ Unlike stereotypical ‘green art,’ Chim↑Pom’s work grasps human-animal relationships through the lens of animosity, where personalisation and ethics are rooted in conflict. Reading their art through an unusual parallel with animist hunting practices that form the basis of ‘traditional’ perspectivism, the article reflects on these asymmetrically related but proximate frameworks and the current revival of scholarly interest in animism.
Message me for author's copy if needed.]
What is climate fiction? Humanities quarrel over the nature of this newly christened genre, pointing to its activist dimensions and pondering its relationship to realism. In this article, I discuss how digital media studies should enter this debate by analyzing climate simulations as a type of climate fiction, one that lies at the core of any subsequent narrative retellings. The status of climate change itself as a simulation signals that by relegating ‘climate fiction’ to a genre, we miss the opportunity to address the larger net of our climate episteme, where fiction operates on multiple levels. I draw parallels between simulated social scenarios in cli fi and simulated scientific scenarios in climate models, and discuss how climate models are like petri dishes for growing fictional Earths in. Rather than cli fi being a ‘retelling’ of what is knowable through ‘climate data,’ I describe how digital climate simulations rely on creating artificial Earths that are worlds unto themselves. It is both through cultural and scientific climate fictions that we model future scenarios. This modelling, a type of ‘fiction’ is in fact the dominant mode of realism with regards to climate change.
Online: http://www.ah-journal.net/issues/01/aspirational-entropy-on-post-soviet-cyberfeminism-and-the-geo-political-freeze-frame
Whole issue here: https://alienistmanifesto.wordpress.com/2020/12/20/alienist-9/
<Envenoment, take 1> thinks through the serpent ancestor politics of feminism-without-example in order to lay the foundations for this possibility.
Powerpoint & notes originally presented at Western Sydney University, July 2017. Video originally presented and performed at Tuning Speculation IV in Toronto, November, 2016.
Introduzione Ibrido recente di femminismo e accelerazionismo, lo xenofemminismo rappresenta la più eclatante insorgenza cyber e tecnologicamente orientata della teoria femminista contemporanea dai tempi del famoso Manifesto Cyborg di Donna Haraway e del lavoro di Sadie Plant presso l'Unità di ricerca sulla cultura cibernetica negli anni Novanta. Insieme alla pubblicazione di dea ex machina (2015), che ripercorre la genealogia dei femminismi che utilizzano lo stato macchinico dell'esistenza contemporanea come proprio banco di prova, lo xenofemminismo mira a recuperare il potenziale liberatorio della tecnologia e dell'alienazione: la libertà di appropriarsi della tecnologia piuttosto che di affrancarsi da essa. All'apparenza, allineando la propria rivoluzione esclusivamente con il dominio tecnologico, lo xenofemminismo prende le distanze dall'ecofemmi-nismo-che di tutti i femminismi è quello che, dal 1980 fino a oggi, ha cercato in maniera più esplicita di realizzare un discorso rivoluzionario riven-dicando la connessione tra donne, animali non umani e ambiente. In questo saggio sostengo che lo xenofemminismo ostacoli il proprio potenziale emancipatorio affidandosi allo stesso dualismo che ha caratterizzato l'ecofemminismo: ovvero, quello che vede natura e tecnologia come entità separate. Fondando la propria teorizzazione in una simile separazione ontologica, incontrastata e universalizzata, lo xenofemminismo restringe la portata della propria apertura metamorfica ed esclude un gran numero di alleat* rivoluzionari*, come ad esempio gli animali non umani.