Redaktørenes Undringer om Kunstighet
av Benjamin Brekke Hordvik, Knut-Johan Farestveit
Artificiality, that which isn’t natural, that which is made, processed and produced. Humanity has developed the artificial from the earliest man-made tools to current day machinery, wherein devices and apparatuses feel as much a part of ourselves as our skin and bone. They emerge through us, become us, and we become them. Be it in the form of synthetic materials, virtual worlds and/or machines – in our day and age the artificial recontextualises what it means to be human. It can be as much beyond or above the (sur-) Real as it’s in opposition to the Real, as much in opposition to man as it’s in the image of man.
With the continuation of modernity and capitalism, this distinction between nature and artifice has become blurred. There are several theorists who have caught onto this tendency: Donna Haraway formulated the image of the ‘cyborg’ as something that is not bound by oppositional constraints such as man-nature, reality-fiction, etc. Giorgio Agamben noted how we’re in many ways controlled by our relation to our apparatuses (dispositif) that manifest as artificial social constructs and tools. And in his book “The New Flesh” (2024) Adam C Jones defines this New Flesh as “The intensified fusion of mankind and media”. You’re not merely born a subject, you’re formed into one. This formation happens through the artificial.
If artifice is so intertwined with our lives, why then do we still try to grasp the Real? Our perception of the Real through the artificial is mediated by representation. Images and fictions form a grand theater of ‘produced’ and ‘made ups’. Through the epoch of post-modernity these images and fictions are perceived as being even more real than real (hyperreal). Fiction permeates reality, references it, molds it and forms it.
In contemporary culture there is the continual presence of the horizon of artificial intelligence. Its gaze sets us in a stasis of fear or a feeling of ecstasy. As it currently stands AI is an uncanny homunculus that lives from our production, becoming something that consumes us for its own use. The emergence of AI and other technologies for surveillance has changed our world from one of disciplinary power to continual recording of data and control. The artificial isn’t merely intersecting our subjectification; it’s that which subjectifies us, but even more so turns us into markers, objective data that can be caught up by the state and used to control its own population. In accordance with this we all live in the shadows of capitalist realism, that period of a stunted imaginary that Mark Fisher described so clearly. The ontologies of deterritorialized capitalism continually colonise all aspects of our lives. Capital tells us to “get real” and accept its artificialities. While this may be the case, it can also be argued that the artificial opens up for new liberatory practices and the ability to profenate that which has been made sacred and outside our control.
As Deleuze wrote; “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.“ Thus, we come to the point where we must interrogate the artificial. It seems to be all around us, defining the world in which we interact. The artificial is everywhere, yet ever so contentious. So we ask, how do you understand the artificial, how do you interrogate and critique it?
Through critiques of AI and the ‘The Hell of the Same’, an investigation into our relation of inputs onto machines and an interrogation of the medium of Cinema. This issue’s goal is to make you wonder about the questions emerging from man's own creations, of its own imaginary, its own image and use. And how that has become not a mere analytical effort, but one that permeates every aspect of (post)modern life.
1 - Donna Haraway, ”A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Socialist Revolution 15, nr. 80 (1985): 65–107, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/mirror/d/dh/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto.pdf.
2 - Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? trans. David Kishik & Stefan Pedatella (2009)
3 - Adam. C. Jones. The New Flesh; Life and Death in the Data Economy (2024)
4 - Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Semiotext(e), 1983)
5 - Gilles Deleuze. Postscripts on the societies of Control (1990)
6 - Fisher. Mark, Capitalist Realism (Zero Books, 2009)
7 - Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? trans. David Kishik & Stefan Pedatella (2009)
8 - Gilles Deleuze, Postscripts on the societies of Control