Kamil Galeev on Dmitry Galkovsky

[Ted Byfield]

This Twitter thread by Kamil Galeev on Dmitry Galkovsky is really worth reading:

https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1533154409722658824

Notable:

"People think with words. If you want to change the way people think about 
things, you *must* be giving those things new names. If you want to be a law 
giver, you must also be a a name giver. And Galkovsky is probably the most 
productive and successful name-giver in modern Russia"

Also:

"When I say that Galkovsky reshaped the Russian nationalist discourse, I don't 
mean the people in power. I don't picture him in a role of 'Putin's secret 
adviser' that so many morons ascribe to Dugin. I imply that he influenced the 
youngsters teaching them what and *how* to think"

And then there are the bits about how the very idea of the medieval period is 
nonsense and all evidence of it is forged, how Protestantism is older than 
Catholicism, etc. I actually studied that stuff, and my hunch is that Galkovsky 
ideas are based at least in part on Walter Bauer's (brilliant) Orthodoxy and 
Heresy in Earliest Christianity, just extrapolated to an absurd degree. But 
Galeev's summary is secondhand, so it's hard to know. Either way, it's 
important to note that 'Galkovskian' ideas and their local equivalents are 
everywhere, not just Russia.

That's helpful on several levels, imo. For example, it lends more nuance to a 
'society vs the state' approach to Russia, which is important for minimizing 
demonization and creating space for constructive resolution; and it also begins 
to address the concerns underlying self-styled anti-imperialist left critiques 
of Western support for Ukraine. But we shouldn't be lulled into both-sidesism. 
This kind of revisionist rubbish is one downside of the sprawling reevaluation 
of so many histories, institutions, and mores. From that, it's easy to see how 
left/prog revisions of national myths could seem equally "extreme," and how 
centrism could seem like a sensible approach. But, as always, we should take 
special care when political rhetoric takes refuge in metaphors of geometry and 
balance.

This war has made it increasingly clear that Putin's relationship to Trump 
should be understood less as instrumental than as co-dependent — two drowning 
men trying to save each other. On its face that might seem a bit meta, but *if 
it's true* I think the implications are huge.

Cheers,
Ted
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House of Mirrors – Artificial Intelligence as phantasm

[Francis Hunger]

  
  
Dear Nettimers,
I'd like to invite you to our exhibiton "House of Mirrors –
  Artificial Intelligence as phantasm" at Hartware
  MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.

Apart from the actual exhibition we just published a
  documentation, printed and PDF, including intro, discussion of the
  works and a newly commissioned essay by Adam Harvey 'Today’s
  Selfie Is Tomorrow’s Biometric Profile' and many installation
  views. Free PDF download
https://www.hmkv.de/files/hmkv/ausstellungen/2022/HOMI/Publikation/House%20Of%20Mirrors%20Magazin%20PDF.pdf

Artists: Aram Bartholl, Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Stéphane Degoutin,
  Sean Dockray, Jake Elwes
  Anna Engelhardt, Nicolas Gourault, Adam Harvey + Jules LaPlace,
  Libby Heaney, Lauren Huret, Zheng Mahler, Lauren Lee McCarthy,
  Simone C Niquille, Elisa Giardina Papa, Julien Prévieux, Anna
  Ridler, RYBN, Sebastian Schmieg, Gwenola Wagon, Conrad Weise,
  Mushon Zer-Aviv

Curated by: Inke Arns, Francis Hunger, Marie Lechner

"Enter the hall of mirrors, which reflects human reality,
  sometimes in direct reflections, sometimes in a distorting mirror,
  sometimes through a glass pane that promises transparency or a
  semi-transparent mirror that reflects on one side and is
  translucent on the other."

From the introduction:

  "Phantasms are narratives that serve to disguise irrevocable
  contradictions intolerable to humans and to oppose a consistent
  perception of reality. AI contains multiple phantasmatic
  narratives. First, it can be said that it masks human fear of
  death by imagining a possible continued life as a machine (in the
  transhumanist movement). Second, it constructs AI as ‘the other’
  of humankind. This phantasm draws on people's longing to be
  relieved from labour, for example, by digital assistants
  coordinating their schedules or by autonomous cars.
Further, the ‘other’ of humankind is reflected in the fear that
  humans could be overwhelmed by the machine developing a kind of
  ‘super intelligence’. It is present, for example, in numerous
  movies and science fiction books in which AI is depicted as
  humanoid robots. In this phantasm, humans are positioned as ‘the
  natural’, ‘the primordial’, and the machine is ‘the artificial’ to
  be distrusted.
It is not only fears, but also desire that is linked to the
  phantasm. The digital assistants that free us from labour portray
  the desire for freedom from the yoke of wage labour to which
  people in capitalist societies submit. The AIs, on the other hand,
  which take over the world, as in the films Ex Machina (Garland
  2014) or Free Guy (Levy 2021), visualize the actually
  inexpressible wish for submission, which, similar to a
  sadomasochistic relationship, also means the freedom of the
  submissive, namely the freedom from responsibility.
All these unconscious desires and fears are hemmed in by taboos,
  social agreements about what may and may not be said. Phantasms
  allow us to bypass these taboos and to express what is actually
  unspeakable. In this sense, this art exhibition is an attempt to
  evoke the phantasms of AI, because artists in particular possess a
  deeper sensitivity that allows them to track down social phantasms
  and shift them from the field of the unspeakable into the field of
  the symbolic."
Best regards

Francis


  



  

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