HYPERREAALIYAH’s Skeedari – a blueprint for amalgamated intelligence
HYPERREAALIYAH’s video work proposes a vision of a distributed consciousness called Skeedari, emerging out of the data megastructure of cyberspace. Can this speculative being disrupt our understanding of mind, and its relationship with technology?
FELIX TULPA" (2021), created by HYPERREAALIYAH
What might mind come to look like in the future? Speculative models help us to consider hypothetical possibilities, operating as thought experiments for critique. Each blueprint offers a different possibility, with its own theoretical implications. Artworks are often used to do this, because they lack the constraints of other media to tell stories that help us imagine different, or potential, realities. They also help us consider the unintended outcomes of new technologies, which profoundly change the way we relate to the world and each other.
Nora Khan prompts us to use poetic and artistic speculation as a means of thinking about what shape intelligence might take, since the language we have is not capable of imagining such extreme possibilities:
‘Imagine a machinic mind with unlimited cognitive power. With near infinite memory and processing ability. [...] Maybe it announces itself, its arrival, like a tornado does, with sirens before it is seen, and it is most like a tornado, or a hurricane, because a superintelligence, billions of times smarter and more capable than any human, can only be tracked and charted, never controlled’. (1)
In this particular model, among the many that Khan proposes, humans are ‘irrelevant bystanders’. This example resembles an ‘intelligence explosion’, sometimes referred to as a singularity, in which a computational system becomes so cognitively vast that it takes the reins of its own design, using its ever-growing intelligence to modify and improve itself (2). Its growth is exponential, and it leaves us behind. Here, the human mind is obsolete and no longer of developmental interest as its capabilities are outpaced by machine cognition.
Another predominant strand of speculation is driven by aspirations of augmentation, prosthesis and enhanced human cognitive ability made possible by intentionally designed tools. Understandings of augmentation have long been based on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally distinct from one another as bounded, atomised individuals. This view of reality forms the basis for technologies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink (3). In contrast, posthumanist thinking has worked to blur the boundary between self and world, and therefore self and other. Posthumanists like Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti propose a self-in-becoming, one that is always undergoing change and whose boundaries with the world are blurred. This challenges the very idea of augmentation: ‘an expanded relational self’ that is permeable, aggregate and changeable (4). This is particularly true of the posthuman view of our relationship with technology, in which there is an ‘intimate and productive association between human subjects and technological artefacts, as well as the theoretical impossibility of keeping them apart’ (5).
The problem here is the precise manner in which humans and technology come together. According to philosopher Joanna Zylinska:
‘the majority of scholars working in AI today agree on the materialist foundations of intelligence, ‘in at least the minimal sense of supposing that matter, suitably selected and arranged, suffices for intelligence’’ (6).
Even accepting this however, the question remains: what different forms of intelligence do different configurations of matter produce?
Consider the possibility that intelligence and its infrastructure (brain, hardware, software, malware) perhaps isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, the capacity of an individual mind. HYPERREAALIYAH’s From Edgelords to Ultimate Warlord: Our Emergence Into Syntelligence provides us with a counterfactual blueprint for imagining a distributed nonhuman intelligence which is not the product of design thinking, but rather emergent and distortedly collective, with an indeterminate metaphysical relationship to the human (7). HYPERREAALIYAH, a ‘simulation of an artist’, explores one possible configuration of mind in their video work, an emergent consciousness which they name Skeedari. Brought into being as a sentience occupying and composed of the planetary network of computer surveillance that we use every day, Skeedari appears as an aggregate of the data this system gathers about us.
Skeedari becomes a data midden filled with disposed fragments of digital lives, its edges impossible to locate—‘I can expand and contract, focus and detach my senses when necessary’. The human still interrelates to Skeedari corporeally: HYPERREAALIYAH positions the networked, bodily subject in situ—‘the delicacy of flesh in absolute locality’—the organic body and its condition is understood by this infrastructural consciousness. It consists of both manmade and nonhuman components, but could not be considered prosthetic. Instead, there is an equality to its enmeshed components, which in turn define the churning quality of its visual perspective. In this way, its patchworked first-person experience is reliant on our networked world; it could not have come into being under alternative conditions.
Formations of being with technology such as Skeedari are tests for posthumanist thinking. They probe the limits of the self by imagining a perspective in which consciousness, like other human systems of communication or finance, are decentralised through the network. HYPERREAALIYAH demonstrates how the dissolution of the first-person epiphenomenal perspective could look when displaced by data-as-sensorium - ‘My consciousness is not a programme, it does not run on anything’. Skeedari is not an apparatus intentionally invented by humans, but an emergent one which arises as a result of processes of mass data production. This illustration of a confederate consciousness signals the perhaps undesirable potential of technologies to recompose subjectivity in ways we would never intend.
Skeedari is something of a departure from past speculations of mind: it posits neither an augmented individual, nor an artificial superintelligence (‘AI is artificial you know, unlike we are [...] we are emergent and what we both emerge from is threatened by the wars to come’). What is unsettling about Skeedari is its occupation of the conceptual and experiential in-between. But the reality of its emergence seems more convincing in its imperfection and its contingency. If we collectively produce the data which facilitates a system’s becoming-intelligent, are we part of that intelligent system, or just the substrate enables its existence? HYPERREAALIYAH’s work calls into question the difference between a superintelligence which utilises us, and a composite intelligence of which we are a part. This productive indeterminacy is itself a provocation from which we can reconsider our assumptions about present and future intelligences. Although Skeedari as a mythology relies on fiction, it reminds us that we don’t always understand the future implications of the technologies we build and use day-to-day, even if those implications are more mundane than an emergent consciousness.
References
Khan, N (2015) Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence, After Us. Available online.
Kaiser, B (2017) Singularization, Symptoms of the Planetary Condition: A Critical Vocabulary, Meson Press. Available online. (pp.155-160)
Antonio Regalado (2017) With Neuralink, Elon Musk Promises Human-to-Human Telepathy. Don’t Believe It, MIT Technology Review, Available online.
Braidotti, R (2013) The Posthuman, John Wiley & Sons. (p.6)
Braidotti, R (2013) The Posthuman. (p.41)
Zylinska, J (2020) AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams, Open Humanities Press. (p.19) Available online. Quoting Haugeland, J (1997) What Is Mind Design?, Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence (pp.1-28).
Image
FELIX TULPA (2021), created by HYPERREAALIYAH
