1. Three Images of the New
Richard Hames
richardjhames@gmail.com
@richardjhames

2. Machine
learning
should be
repurposed
for
Modernism
Philosophy Social Science Practice Design
Affect Theory Critical Theory Performance Art
Aesthetics Societal Design
Existentialism Coordination
Cognitive Science

3. Serialism Simple set
transformations
used as musical
material
The commonly
accepted
parameters of music
are used
But parametrisation
changes them

4. Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)

5. Graphical plot of calculated velocities. Horizontal axis is time, vertical is
particle speed. Each large division represents a different set of
temperature/pressure parameters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvH2KYYJg-o

6. Xenakis
Actual
Fluid
Brownian
Motion
Music
There are multiple points at which transformation occurs.
Lots of music is formed in the collision of different systems.

7. Two key aspects:
● Abstraction or parameterisation
● Media specificity
These two are in tension.
Modernism

8. Modernism
Interdisciplinary integration of logic and media
combined with
wild parametric experimentation

9. Image 1: Philosophy
Critique as the making visible of hyperparameters
But critique resists its own instantiation in process

10. Image 2: Social Design
Thrownness, particularity of experience, and coordination of
the local and the global through the algorithm
Thrownness is the experience of being deployed to a search
space

11. Image 3: From Opera to Practice Design
There are two modes of abstraction here - not only is there an abstraction from
things to logics, but the process of abstraction itself takes on an abstract character
Gesamtkunstwerk - total art work
The project of totalisation failed because media are resistant
And because of budget cuts
Abstracted logic Sets Proceduralisation in the form of
the algorithm
Media Music Human Behaviour

12. Image 3: Practice Design
How does social control function?
Through protocols (also called apparatuses)
A protocol is a set of rules that govern behaviour in a domain
How can we see them?
By attempting to act differently, and experiencing the resistance of ourselves as
media to that functioning

13. Critical Practice Design
How can the explicitation of practices, using mass or bespoke data collection, lead
to the codification and analysis of our most commonly used protocols, outside of
the domain of humanist critical work?
How can we design new protocols for action through ‘wild parametric
experimentation’?

14. Critical Practice Design
Business owners attempt to codify human behaviour in order to make profits from it
efficiently. This also leads to the reduction in complexity of human behaviour in
certain situations.
The Quantified Self movement attempts to codify human behaviour, but only to
optimise it for individually defined ends.

15. Humanism
Use algorithms to push beyond how we are used by protocols, not for the sake of a
humanist vision, nor for the sake of capital accumulation, but for the sake for the
mixing of our practices with another form of logic
The axiom that ‘technology as the design of machines for rational ends’ requires
suspending
The rationality embedded in the object can no longer be a kind of instrumentalism

16. ● Do activities such that they can’t appear to the data collection system
● Do activities such that the least likely thing to happen in any given situation happens
● Do activities such that the data collection can most clearly understanding what you are
doing
● Do activities such that over time the set of activities the algorithm is capable of
understanding as distinct increases
● Do activities such that over time some variable is maximised
Some possible relations between models and activity

17. Continued
● Do activities such that some kind of structure visible in the activities you were doing
becomes invisible
● Do activities such that the hyperparameter tuning which effectively captures those
activities is shifted
● Do activities such that over time some activities are gradually removed
● Do the activities of another person
● Do activities according to the model, except experiment with parameters of the
autoencoder

18. Dimensions of human action and the human medium
What are the dimensions of human
action?
Can an autoencoder be used to
construct a model of human
behaviour that assigns its own
dimensions to our behaviour?
Can these dimensions be operated on
experimentally to design behaviours?
The idea of apparatuses skirts the
question of the human medium by
opening itself up to a certain degree
of flexibility in application. They
simultaneously exist at various levels
of scale and in qualitatively different
modes, so that we can shift back and
forth between these levels freely. This
is why the algorithms always require a
human helper, like a guide dog trying
to order at the post office

19. ● Decapitation
Instructions for particular actions
● Proclivities
The modulation of proclivities (a kind of media specificity)
● Navigation
Experimentation with the rules of navigation (media as the social context of action)
Early Experiments (in three levels of abstraction)

20. The explicitation of the parameters of the
system of human behaviours should be
used to experiment with system states
beyond the usual bounds of its functioning,
to design new protocols for action which
are neither humanist in intention nor expect
reintegration into the social totality

21. Questions?
References:
Laboria Cuboniks - Xenofeminism
Reza Negarestani - The Labor of the Inhuman, What is Philosophy?
Hiroki Azuma - Otaku
Paul Preciado - Testo Junkie
Thanks to Cameron Alexander and Amelia Horgan