mystics
Under the theme Mystics of the Chthulucene, a yearlong artistic research project for The Couch, we explore the uncanny affinities between Artificial Intelligence and magic. We acknowledge that AI and magic are both technologies and tools designed as an extension of human action, and at the same time they are precarious and unpredictable extensions of human creativity and worldbuilding. We find ourselves in a time when magic can be associated with AI and other digital technologies, but it is also being used to harness, confront, and even attack or defend from AI. We will work with artists who approach this entanglement from many angles in order to approach an answer to the question: Is Artificial Intelligence foretelling a new cosmology? Alongside artistic research essays by artists dealing with this topic, we will feature interviews, fiction, a podcast made in collaboration with Future Artefacts and more.

essay
POV:
Ginevra Petrozzi makes the case for a complicated relationship between ourselves and the artificial intelligence tools that guide us through our lives. The stories and myths we construct around the technologies we don’t understand can help us navigate the obscure and even violent power of artificial intelligence.
video
POV: Time To Influence Your Targeted Ads
"Define your 'perfect future' in positive and using the present tense (ex: not ‘I would like to do’, but ‘I do’). Imagine that you have reached your goal overnight: tomorrow morning, how do you realise that the transformation has taken place?"

essay
Mystics of the Chthulucene
Cthulhu – H.P. Lovecraft’s science fiction monster – lurks under the surface of the ocean as an elemental deity. We must wonder what lurks beneath the surface of the systems known as AI.

essay
The mindless sc/troller
If the postmodern (digital) experience is a similarly disorienting experience to that of the modern flâneur, then is it possible to adopt the same approach to the web as to the city, where the mind can freely wander and transform?

interview
Terrestrial Technologies: An Interview with Patricia Domínguez
If you look beyond their corporate functionality, these bodies are all going to the Earth to be repaired from damage by a system that never stops.