Betti Marenko

This article proposes to examine animism through the perspective provided by a notion of immanent matter drawn on process philosophy, and quantum physics. It then deploys this perspective to illuminate how planetary computation - the impact of digital media technologies on a planetary scale - is rewiring the cognitive, affective, perceptual capacities of the human. The article puts forward the notion of hybrid animism, as a speculative and imaginative philosophical fiction to grasp planetary computation as a sensorial pan-affective event, and to account for the hybrid techno-digital ecologies humans already inhabit, characterised by ongoing modulation, sensorial intensification and pervasive distribution of computational matter across a plethora of screens, surfaces and surroundings. The value of this proposition, the article explains, is to eschew dominant techno-deterministic narratives: not only techno-euphoria and techno-dystopia, but also the notion of technology as enchantment, with its in-built mystification. By deploying the philoso-fiction of hybrid animism and the un-mediated intuitive sensorial grasp it fosters, planetary computation can begin to be immediately perceived as the expression of new modes of co-habitation and co-evolution of the human and the nonhuman. Finally, the article brings together the nonhuman mutating surfaces of digital matter with cephalopods' skins to vividly and speculatively illustrate hybrid animism as a thought experiment of sorts.

Today’s social, political, and environmental emergencies require specific efforts in terms of thinking/acting in designing practices to produce new kinds of knowledge. The Summer School wants to explore the emerging systemic transition which demands a radical transformation of knowledge models. The uncertainty that characterizes times of crisis forces us to question the strategies, tools, and instruments at our disposal to understand the current context and change it through design. With the pandemic striking our usual way to think the future, this may be the opportunity to better understand the huge potential of future literacies as a methodological tool to convey concepts and information in rethinking knowledge boundaries. Located at the intersection of the material, the cultural, the epistemic, the ontological, the technological, the philosophical, the political, design contains the seeds of the capacity for becoming an agent of radical transformation and generative production. It can do that on the condition that it becomes also a medium of critical inquiry, unleashing its capacity to interrogate the present and build new worlds, beyond the overwhelming deterministic visions pushed by contemporary socio-technical and socio-economic systems. The School will be a theoretical and pragmatic occasion to challenge knowledge systems, based on deterministic blueprints and models, and to reimagine and re-make design as a mode of inquiry and as a practice to interrogate the present. It might lead to an inter-, trans-, post-disciplinary exploration exploring the role, agency, and responsibility of design in showing unexpected possible directions of change. It might be a meta-knowledge inquiry about Research through Design within the perspective of decolonizing knowledge, unfolding the opportunities of knowing, and world-building. It might be an investigation of how speculative and critical approaches can be deployed to rethink futures in light of theories and the practices coming from other disciplines.

How do we do critique in algorithmic age? As planetary computation is redesigning human modes of existence, altering cognition, perception, and circulation of affects, not only is it changing what counts as human; it is also radically changing how knowledge is produced and what counts as knowledge. During the talk we will examine some of the dominant narratives circulating around digital technologies to question the techno-determinist visions they embody – in particular notions such as ‘solutionism’, ‘techno-enchantment’ and ‘platform design’. We will consider ways in which how our human relationship with machines – in the broader sense of the term - could be rethought as developing meta-stable hybrid ecologies of the human with the nonhumanity of machines, with a focus on how the encounter with artificial intelligence could be re-imagined. We will then use these ideas to illuminate the cognitive and epistemological shift generated by the data-driven logic of computation in the light of theories of algorithmic governance, and conclude with some pointers for designers wishing to mobilize these ideas in their work.

This paper, written during lockdown while involved in remote teaching, looks at the impact of platform technologies to reflect on how human agency has been machine-reconfigured in the name of efficiency. It posits that a technocratic shift operates by capturing the messy flow of embodied experience, turning it into an operational and constantly upgradable toolkit, and asks for a consideration of the implications of this process of “toolification”, especially in the context of creative studio practice.

In a context increasingly defined by post-normal science it is acknowledged that complex world problems cannot be addressed by one discipline in isolation. To face increasingly uncertain futures it is therefore crucial to develop approaches that work with uncertainty. Because of its future-facing nature and current drive to tackle world challenges, design has a leading role to play in this endeavour. The article proposes a research framework informed by the development of hybrid literacies – transversal toolkits across design, technologies and futures studies – that can furnish learners with transdisciplinary skills. These are deemed necessary to address uncertainty and complexity by deploying speculative-pragmatic, imaginative practices that foster modes of working, learning and unlearning together. To illustrate this approach, the article draws on the ongoing collaboration between two academic institutions renowned respectively in the field of Art and Design and Science and Technology to offer a personal reflection and insights around transdisciplinarity and hybrid literacies in action.

Planetary computation. An epochal shift rewires humanity by impacting on our capacity to feel, to perceive, to sense and to think. Far from being a mere matter of speed of communication, this change has to do with the creation of new interlocking ecologies where information is sensed and the cognitive, perceptual and affective spheres mutate. Sensation prevails on signification. Data becomes us. Mediation shifts to immediation. This is the 4th Revolution when the digital-online world spills into and merges with the analogue-offline world. In this onlife experience, data is the new currency, code is synchronized to the human and the infosphere becomes synonymous with reality.1 The proliferation of smartalgorithmic environments evolving in real time, the colonization of daily life by social networks, the tsunami of data, the unstoppable googlification of knowledge together create new ecologies of cohabitation and coevolution of the human with the nonhumanity of planetary computation. Given this scenario, two questions emerge as urgent. What is the impact ofthe ongoing informatization of bodies, artefacts and environments on the whole of human cognition, affectivity and perceptual faculties? What kind of narratives, images and fictions are needed to make sense of the ecologies we now inhabit, populated by agents on a continuum between the human and the nonhuman, a mix of the human with machines, dataflows, codes, algorithms; strange entanglements of silicon and carbon?

Drawing on Simondon’s vision of the primitive magical universe - the original harmonious mode of existence of the human in the world - the chapter proposes that a new algorithmic magical and animistic universe is in the making in our contemporary computational world. By framing the immersive experience of computation and its sensibilities, perceptions and affects through Simondon’s magical unity where humans are integral part of a totalizing and harmonious whole, the chapter looks at the black mirrors of our digital screens as the portals into a new magical and animistic reticulation of the human and the nonhuman. This perspective locates the algorithm within a genealogy of the relationship between technology and magic, and reads it as a mysterious form of nonhuman intelligence performing in inscrutable ways. It is the increasing autonomous agency and digital uncertainty of algorithms that engenders a new magical and animistic universe.

The subtitle to this ‘Introduction’ might well be How to catalyse an encounter between philosophy and design, as one of the main drivers of this project has been how to bring to the fore possible connections between the two practices that this book interrogates: Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, as the practice of creating concepts, and design, as the practice of materialising possibilities. Deleuze’s work offers a way of thinking about the encounter between philosophy and design, as they are both concerned with expressing the creation of the not yet in impactful ways. Furthermore, for Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?, a creative philosophy is pitched as dealing in use, profit, interest, value and success, and certainly not truth. ‘We will not say of so many books of philosophy that they are false’, they write, ‘for that is to say nothing, but rather that they lack importance or interest, precisely because they do not create any concept’ (1994: 82–3). This language brings us close to that used in design, especially when its creative influence is articulated in terms of innovation (Flynn and Chatman 2004; Cox 2005). An interesting, important, successful philosophy deals not in truth or falsity, but in engaging with different creative activities in many different registers having multiple layers of affect. This should declare our editorial intentions by providing the overall intellectual framework to which this book intends to abide: that if there is a way of designing that both affects and is affected by Deleuze’s philosophy, it will be found at the intersection of said practices.

The notion that the future has a ‘shape’ is a deep-rooted construct, the cornerstone of how chance is mediated, for example through the ‘distributions’ of probability theory. Algorithmic prediction, via machine learning, builds on these shapes and amplifies their complexity and authority. While the problematic effects of this predictive regime and the preemptive politics it supports are objects of concern for scholars and practitioners across the humanities, social sciences, art, and philosophy, design is surprisingly disengaged from this conversation. Instead, it is either concerned with data visualization, often without questioning its positivist ontology, or with ‘seamless’ non-interfaces which effectively seek to remove choice. Against this backdrop, our proposal brings together design theory and design practice to interrogate current modes of algorithmic prediction and the construction of subjectivity enabled by ‘choice design’. Our designed artifacts are diagrams to think through practice about the shape of the possible. Rather than designing predictable futures, we aim to use diagram-making to expose and reframe choice design. These design artifacts - initial and ongoing experiments in mapping YouTube recommendations - are a series of computational diagrams that weave together the tools of computational prediction, critical design practice, and theory.

How are the transformations in digital technologies reconfiguring the machinic phylum and the social/mental realms of the human? What is the impact of the nonhumanity of the digital on practices of constitution of subjectivity? My paper explores these themes by moving beyond the notion of technological tool that still permeates conceptualization of digital machines. Drawing on Simondon’s technicity, and Felix Guattari’s machinology, I will look at current human-machine interaction from the perspective of the nonhuman, in particular examining how the algorithmdriven prediction paradigm prevalent in computation may be counteracted by modulation, contingency and uncertainty. The distinction between trivial and non-trivial machines is proposed as a model promoting the value of digital uncertainty and how this feeds into the design of new assemblages of silicon and carbon.

Betti Marenko explores the changing status of the technodigital object - and the mobile intensities that characterize the current objectscape - to account for objects’ evolving intelligence. She looks at how hand-held mobile devices, are reshaping the nexus object-subject into temporal discontinuities of human and non-human assemblages. Her talk argues that the shift from object to event delineated by Gilles Deleuze – where space becomes time, form becomes formation, and moulding becomes modulation - needs to be taken on board by design practices and discourses as constitutive of a material-driven epochal shift. A morphogenetic perspective on matter prompts design to question some of its assumptions around how objects actually come to exist, and in broader terms, design’s own relationship with materiality. She argues for a shift in design’s theoretical location, from design as a problem solving activity - a task-oriented, performance-measured, linear exercise, that reduces uncertainty, a conventional view of design as a technology of affective capture enforcing and reproducing market ideologies - to design as a problem finding enterprise – that is, an enterprise that veers towards problematizing and complexifying the existent. Within this morphogenetic framework design should come unhinged from its teleological fixation with form and function, and embrace instead an intuition-based apprehension rooted in ‘following matter’, vagueness and variation. This perspective is deployed to examine the silicon-based materiality of digital devices and their key component, the microchip. Silicon is examined in reference to both Deleuze’s prophetic ‘revenge of the silicon’ and also by looking at how a new breed of microchips that ‘follow’ neural activity are bypassing the distinction between carbon and silicon-based life, animate and inanimate matter, and articulating new forms of intelligence. The convergence of silicon and carbon, via Deleuze’s concept of nonorganic life, allows Marenko to read the technodigital object as the site of diverse material intelligences unfolding morphogenetically, beyond the narrow paradigms of cyborgness on the one hand and dematerialization on the other.

Our proposal brings together two approaches—design theory and design practice—to critically interrogate current modes of algorithmic prediction. We take the diagrammatic nature of machine learning as an entry/meeting point. This offers a design-driven understanding of computational prediction, and allows us to propose alternative strategies rooted in speculative methods, divinatory practices, and imaginative storytelling. Machine learning algorithms operate in multi-dimensional mathematical space; they create knowledge through operations, comparisons, and transformations of vectorised data. The shape of this space—and therefore the scope of predictions that can be made from it—is constrained by the training data and by the wide range of statistical operations and linear algebra that machine learning performs. In this current scenario, causality is superseded by a correlation-based type of rationality that predicts occurrences of phenomena as literal 'patterns' rather than searching for causes and allowing for contingency. This process has profound implications for what counts as knowledge as it forecloses the space of potential—what might happen or might not happen. By drawing on selected aspects of Deleuze's thought we discuss ways of 'diagramming' alternative narratives of these spaces of potential in order to reclaim algorithmic prediction as a productive mode of speculation; one that is able to predict radically new futures. The aim is to design a form of diagram-making that is liberating, enabling of the new and, crucially, able to actualize the very potential otherwise captured by contemporary apparatuses of algorithmic prediction. Invited talk. Presented at the Panel "Design Anthropology: Uniting experience and imagination in the midst of social and material transformation". Art, Materiality and Representation Conference. British Museum. With David Benqué.

The issue I explore with this position paper concerns dominant cultural scripts around Artificial Intelligence and the need to imagine different narratives in light of machine learning’s autonomous performativity. The aim is to offer a philosophical reflection, not only to sidestep narratives of techno-determinism, dystopia and existential risk to mankind, but also to speculate on how to imagine a benevolent AI based on uncertainty and the co-evolution of humans and technology. The paper presents the speculative methodology I call FutureCrafting: a forensic, diagnostic and divinatory method that investigates the possibility of other discourses, equally powerful in building reality, constructing futures and having tangible impact. FutureCrafting is speculation at the juncture of design and philosophy, pivoting around the open-ended figuration of the what if…? It articulates collaboration rather than competition, coevolution rather than antagonism, and privileges the indeterminate and the imaginative. To conclude, the paper makes reference to the non-human intelligence of the octopus and to how this can inform a more imaginative AI.

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze this chapter investigates the virtual as what problematizes the possible by inserting contingency in the process of emergence of the new. The tension between the virtual as what is uniquely placed to engender true innovation, and its aleatory and unforeseeable nature mirrors the tension existing in design between form-making and the need to acknowledge contingency. In embracing the un-designability of the virtual, design is called to take contingency and material variability as forces impinging on the process of emergence of the new. The chapter puts forward a new model for design research that shifts from problem-solving to problem-finding and is predicated on the undesigned at the core of design itself. This points to a further shift: the role of designer from creator to facilitator, teasing form out of the formless, engaged with the manifold forces expressed through material variation.

My paper investigates the possible connections among affect, design and late-capitalism strategies of commodification of experience. Drawing from a Spinozistic-Deleuzian concept of affect I intend to map how the current production of subjectivities is profoundly entangled with capitalist strategies of management and control of the affective sphere. As Deleuze wrote in his prescient Post-Script on the Societies of Control, contemporary capitalism operates by mining and modulating the pathosphere. Value is now extracted from life; a new distribution of the sensible shapes consumption; affects are being co-opted by what I call semio-chemio-affective-neuro capital. The contemporary pathosphere is being designed by interventions that simultaneously indicate capitalism’s capacities for reinvention, as well as the relentless expansion of the signature of the commodity. Specifically, the encounter with designed commodities needs to be probed to address the way in which subjectivities are being produced by, and emerge from, the designing of experience itself as a commodity. What types of subjectivities are required by the current formation of capitalism? Can it be argued that these new affect-literate subjectivities emerge from their relations with designed commodities? How can this encounter with the commodity be reconfigured to account for contagious affective competencies? Are subjectivities increasingly designed and commodified too?

Our relationship with objects is far less clear-cut than a rational materialism predicated upon a subject/object distinction would have us believe. On the contrary, it is a messy and unpredictable one, electrified by emotional investments, often anxiety-ridden, never innocent or neutral, and always implicated in powerful identity-forming practices. This essay examines instances of contemporary animism in our relationship with object-relics by mapping the symbolic and affective investments these objects are charged with. The hypothesis is that their borderline ontological status defies simple categorization and that it might be better examined through the lens of a neo-animist paradigm able to express the complex, relational and negotiated engagement between us and the material world. The belief in the thaumaturgical power of object-relics is a persistent if irrational cultural topos that, precisely because it operates transversally and adheres to a wide array of commodities, can be the entry point for an investigation into how the meaning of things around us is generated and produces tangible effects in the making (and unmaking) of subjectivities. It is my intention to question the distinction between animate and inanimate objects, to privilege instead their opaque and enigmatic status, and the way in which they act as clusters of excess of meaning, as strange attractors of a surplus of significance quintessentially irreducible