Glass Bead, 2: Site 1: Logic Gate, the Politics of the Artifactual Mind (2017) [English/French]

“The first issue of the journal was dedicated to repositioning art in the landscape of reason. This issue is focused on the fabric of reason itself, and the ways in which it is currently altered by the emergence of artificial intelligence.

While the capacities of thought are being externalized in machines that increasingly mirror human intelligence, the question of the technical artifactuality of mind and its political ramifications becomes particularly pressing.

For us, far from being limited to the computational instantiation of intelligence, understanding the politics of these developments in artificial intelligence requires acknowledging that mind has always been artifactual.

Site 1: Logic Gate, the Politics of the Artifactual Mind proposes to explore the formal, philosophical and scientific dimensions of this question, so as to consider the role art might play in the lucid unfolding of its possibilities.”

With contributions by Danielle Macbeth, Gary Tomlinson, Matt Hare, Ben Woodard, Nina Power, Matteo Pasquinelli, Benjamin Bratton, Nora Khan, Hito Steyerl, Ian Cheng, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Reviel Netz, Peli Grietzer, Lee Gamble, Dhanveer Singh Brar, T’ai Smith, and James Trafford.

Edited by Fabien Giraud, Jeremy Lecomte, Vincent Normand, Ida Soulard, and Inigo Wilkins
Publisher Glass Bead, November 2017

HTML, PDFs (English)
HTML, PDFs (French)
See also Issue 1

Pamela McCorduck: Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence, 2nd ed. (1979/2004)

“Pamela McCorduck first went among the artificial intelligentsia when the field was fresh and new, and asked the scientists engaged in it what they were doing and why. She saw artificial intelligence as the scientific apotheosis of one of the most enduring, glorious, often amusing, and sometimes alarming, traditions of human culture: the endless fascination with artifacts that think. Machines Who Think was translated into many languages, became an international cult classic, and stayed in print for nearly twenty years.

Now, Machines Who Think is back, along with an extended addition that brings the field up to date in the last quarter century, including its scientific and its public faces. McCorduck shows how, from a slightly dubious fringe science, artificial intelligence has moved slowly (though not always steadily) to a central place in our everyday lives, and how it will be even more crucial as the World Wide Web moves into its next generation.”

First edition published by W. H. Freeman, 1979.

Publisher A.K. Peters, Natick, MA, 2004
ISBN 1568812051, 9781568812052
xxx+565 pages

Reviews: Philip Mirowski (AI Magazine, 2003), Richard Ennals (AI & Society, 2004), Mike Holderness (New Scientist, 2004).

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Gene Kogan, Francis Tseng: Machine Learning for Artists (2016–)

“This is an in-development book about machine learning. The first draft is expected early-2017. Some chapters are nearly complete, some are very rough, some are just stubs.

Guides and Demos are being released as we go. Guides are a collection of practical resources for working with machine learning software, including code and tutorials. Demos are are a collection of figures and interactive demos for highlighting important concepts in machine learning, and supplementing the book’s materials.”

Chapters (HTML)
Guides (HTML, Python)
Demos (HTML, Javascript)