Imagining Machines – Next 18 – 2018-09

Talk given for Next 18 in Hamburg. The talk centred on the possibility of imagining radically different forms of machines by drawing on historical precedent and quesitoning assumptions of power and efficiency in innovation myths. 

The profound otherness of computation presents radical opportunities for new ways of being in the world. How might being or becoming computational offer new potentials for the ways that we cognate, observe and calculate the world. How are the categories and definitions we’ve laid down over the modern history of humanity change if we embrace a computational reality devoid of obtuse boundaries and old power structures? In taking technology away from narratives of efficiency, productivity and consumption we open up opportunities for new, sublime, even spiritual ways of being, if we can only imagine them.