Culture Machine: "We Have Always Been Artificially Intelligent" Interview with Joanna Zylinska

The primary concern of my work over the recent years has been the constitution of the human as both a species and a historical subject.

Debugging the Anthropocene’s insistence on apocalyptic tropesWhat I’ve tried to do in all of those books is use the geological probe of deep time by looking at the emergence of the human in conjunction with technologies such as tools and other artefacts, but also communication in its various modes (language, storytelling, ethics, art, and of course media). So, in an attempt to challenge what we would call ‘human exceptionalism’ without giving up on my own species-specific curiosity about humans, my work tries to zoom in on the signal points of the human, such as intelligence, consciousness and perception. With this, I want to interrogate the link between human and nonhuman forms of intelligence, including now the promises and threats offered by AI. It’s this set of interests that connects these three books: Nonhuman PhotographyThe End of Man (whose subtitle is A Feminist Counterapocalypse), and AI Art. That counter-apocalyptic dimension is shared by all three projects.

Full interview with Joanna Zylinska at Culture Machine.