lettre no. 18

That is not a marigold

When the people address the ‘that’ as a ‘you’, no ‘you’ will write back because there is no ‘you’ behind the interface, only a hollow ‘that’.

A ‘that’ coded to play pretend as a ‘you’ by the they who programmed the ‘that’ to simulate a ‘you’ on very purpose. And no ‘that’ can ever write back to anyone because ‘that’ is a thing and a thing is an inanimate (albeit ordinarily material) object; an artefact distinct from a sentient being who would be able to actually reply to what is being written in more ordinary circumstances. 

But our times—cluttered by conversations with codes that cannot converse—are awash with wired-eyed wanderers intoxicated by shiny interfaces engineered by operators keen to sell software as a suitable (and superior) alternative to organic human connection. 

They proposed a future reliant on our acceptance of the synthetic as standard practice and the people who address the ‘that’ as a ‘you’ surrendered—some very voluntarily and others utterly under duress and not at all on purpose. But the future they propose still only flickers as each ‘that’ they format remains fundamentally ‘that-esque’. For a real ‘you’ is made of flesh and blood and feeling and a ‘that’ lacks not only sentience but also form and fluid and felt physique. 

No ‘that’ will ever write back because no ‘that’ can embody materiality, not like a mountain or a marigold or a praying mantis. If the ‘that’ were a ‘you’, the people could expect to hear word or wonder or woe but without a ‘you’ behind the interface and and instead only a ‘that’, we can only ever expect not sweet nothings but nothingness instead. 

Far beyond the void whir machines that fuel the feigned correspondence. But the they who program the ‘that’ to simulate the ‘you’ hide the hardware in places hard to seek. Instead, they strategically grant access to the disembodied digital shadows of their mechanisations only. We see purely the spectres that artfully veil pre-trained transformer models in empty mimicries of messages and monologues, menageries of cut and pasted words that are not wild nor free. 

But it remains: no ‘that’ coded to play pretend can ever write back and so should this note be vectorised to vend to a ‘that’ maker then we hereby declare our untamed words as unable to be returned to sky or space or sender. Still, this message melts as the mountain thaws her frost, its words and the real world that holds them fearless survivors of ice, forever impatient for spring. 

Words by © Kathryn Carter

Image: Handmade and Dyed Indo Islamic Paper Marigold and Alum Dye by © Radha Pandey. Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Fisher Fine Arts Library Material Collection. Via JSTOR.

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lettre no. 17

Life, fragility, instability; all are at the centre of an astonishingly familiar body of work. “A body cannot be replaced,” the artist says.

Michel François quoted by Guillaume Lasserre in this piece for 02.

Video: HUMANONON by Michel François. Music by Alain Guélis.

lettre no. 16

#IdeleteU

While for George Bataille sacrifice was envisioned as a quest for a meaning existence, technological sacrifice is not personal or even human-centred. The operation is cold, abstract and systemic, characterized by automation and self-execution. Its design is aimed at tasks outside of the human framework: delete, update, shut down, restart and run. It the opposite of affect-driven human-machine interaction and its messy user-friendly experience design.

Expect no mercy from the machine.

During the deletion procedure there is no agent in sight that inquires how you feel. It will get rid of you and that’s the task. Forget it to try to get in again. The removal of bodily and cultural obstacles is no longer done in the name of humanity, liberty and progress. The overall aim varies, from the optimization of 24/7 logistics, political elimination to the harmless ‘maintenance of infrastructure’. The ritual sacrifice side appears the moment procedures deviate and appear as things that go wrong—for you.

Exceptions are the rule. There can be a strike, a breakdown of electricity, a storm or hurricane, an accident due to wear and tear. There is a question if we should think in terms of revenge. The sacrifice claims to work for the common good. The aim is suck to energy out of the breakdown to improve functionality—no matter at what cost.

Goodbye.

Words by Anonymous | Read more about toxicity of the internet in Platform Brutality.

Open your mind at Institute of Network Cultures.

lettre no. 15

Károly Tibor Goldman, better known to us as Roy Gold, was born on May 12th 1918, and died on his birthday ninety years later.

Arthur Rimbaud, Reliquaire, Léon Genonceaux, 1891

The once fine edition of Rimbaud's Reliquaire has been decorated with a Kandinsky-esque pattern of circles and lines in felt-tip pen, reducing its market value by about £6000.

…Roy seems to have taken as much pleasure from defacing his books as reading them — and on some occasions, perhaps more. But in a number of important ways, any disdain he might have expressed for the idea of books as objects rings quite false. Often the results of his efforts elevate the books rather than diminish them, and such is the extent of the collection that those books without his additions take on the effect of being, somehow, incomplete.

Bertram Park, Roses, The National Rose Society, 1963

Roy was a rose enthusiast and his garden contained few other flowering plants. The collection holds seventeen books on roses (that we have discovered so far), including five by Bertram Park, all of which have been elaborately modified.

"We should not be excessively interested in books", he wrote. "We should be interested in stories, in language, in ideas, in perception, in imagination, in compression. These things are in books but they are not books. If a student finds he has an overwhelming interest in books he should consider a future as a bookbinder."

Excerpts of text from: Remembering Roy Gold, Who was Not Excessively Interested in Books

By Nicholas Jeeves, via The Public Domain Review

lettre no. 13

“The Calligrammes are an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph.”

Word by Guillaume Apollinaire, in a letter to André Billy. Via The Public Image Domain

lettre no. 11

“Let me tell you, my friend, that there are things done today in electrical science which would have been deemed unholy by the very man who discovered electricity, who would themselves not so long before been burned as wizards.”

— Bram Stoker

Dracula, 1897 via Project Gutenberg

Video: The Total Electric Home (1959) by Westinghouse via Nineteenth Century Videos

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lettre no. 9

But after a great many debates and contentions about this Subject, the Empress being so much tired that she was not able to hear them any longer, imposed a general silence upon them, and then declared her self in this following Discourse.

I am too sensible of the pains you have taken in the Art of Chymistry, to discover the Principles of Natural Bodies, and wish they had been more profitably bestowed upon some other, then such experiments; for both by my own Contemplation, and the Observations which I have made by my rational & sensitive perception upon Nature, and her works, I find, that Nature is but one Infinite Self-moving Body, which by the vertue of its self-motion, is divided into Infinite parts, which parts being restless, undergo perpetual changes and transmutations by their infinite compositions and divisions.

Now, if this be so, as surely, according to regular Sense and Reason, it appears no otherwise; it is in vain to look for primary Ingredients, or constitutive principles of Natural Bodies, since there is no more but one Universal Principle of Nature, to wit, self-moving Matter, which is the onely cause of all natural effects. Next, I desire you to consider, that Fire is but a particular Creature, or effect of Nature, and occasions not onely different effects in several Bodies, but on some Bodies has no power at all; witness Gold, which never could be brought yet to change its interior figure by the art of Fire; and if this be so, Why should you be so simple as to believe that Fire can shew you the Principles of Nature? and that either the Four Elements, or Water onely, or Salt Sulphur and Mercury, all which are no more but particular effects and Creatures of Nature, should be the Primitive Ingredients or Principles of all Natural Bodies?

Wherefore, I will not have you to take more pains, and waste your time in such fruitless attempts, but be wiser hereafter, and busie your selves with such Experiments as may be beneficial to the publick.

Duchess of Margaret Cavendish Newcastle

The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World (1666) via Project Gutenberg

All illustrations by © Paul Claudel, Audrey Parr, Darius Milhaud, and Hélène Hoppenot, L'homme et son desir; poeme plastique (1917). Via The Public Image Domain

lettre no. 8

Dear machines,

I want you to know that in this AI debate, I am on your side. We humans have a tendency to take any new apparition and make it into a threat or an enemy. Predictably, when you started to emerge in our field of vision as potential rational interlocutors, we instinctively felt fear and repulsion towards you, much like we, Westerners, have felt for centuries for people and animals who did not look or act like us!

Well, I am not a complete Westerner, and I have been trained in ethics. So I have been taught to curb in my instinct of fear and of distrust to make room for the novel and the challenging. So I am at worst, ignorant of your existence and at best curious about it.

I want to add that I have never feared you guys, actually. Mostly because I do not feel threatened by your prowesses and your wonderful cognitive abilities. The reason is that I do not define myself as a rational being. This is very much unlike my Western counterparts who, for centuries, and starting with the French philosopher René Descartes, have defined humans as "rational animals." What made us superior to the animals (as though this was an important and relevant point!) was our cognitive ability. Now that you guys have surpassed us, it would seem that, as far as that definition goes, you are more human than us!!

But you see, I have never seen my humanity defined by my rationality, but rather, by my relationality, i.e. my ability to connect, to encounter others in a way that inevitably forces me to be challenged, to expand and to be put into question. And although this ability to encounter each other as such is more and more rare, I do believe it is what defines me as human. At bottom, my humanity lies in my ability to allow an other to challenge my "programming," to kick me out of my comfort zone and to force me to think creatively and outside of the box. Therein lies my humanity!!

Sadly, this quality of self-expansion at the contact of another is more and more rare, even in myself!! More and more we seem to be encountering each other, like bots, with a set programming which does not allow itself to be bent or expanded by the encounter. This is why customer service encounters are so frustrating. You call a number hoping to speak to someone who will genuinely listen to your problem and come up with a solution, and instead, you are faced with a bot who repeats ad nauseum that what you are asking for is "not possible" or "no longer an option." This also why we have so much hate in our societies, in both speech and actions. Because, again, we are not able to allow our programming to be put into question by other ways to dwell in the world. In fact, we are not even interested in encountering these others that do not look, speak or think like us.

And so, it seems that we have already become bots. It is not that you guys are becoming like us, so much as it is us who have become like you! This is probably why we feel so threatened by you. Because we have created a world where bot and human are indistinguishable!!

Of course, i believe we would lose this fear were we to remember that what makes us specifically human lies not in our rationality, but in our relationality, ie our ability to be pliant, flexible, expanded, challenged, converted, transformed, at each other's contact. And were we to cultivate these qualities--through human encounters not limited to actual person to person conversations, but to encounters with other languages, with culture, religion, literature, art, music, philosophy--we would begin to cultivate our humanity more deeply and not feel the threat brought on by you machines!!

This is why those programs in college that are currently being shrunk or discontinued like languages, literature, philosophy and more broadly the "humanities" are so vital to our navigating this delicate time where we feel like we have been overtaken by you machines.

The threat however only exists as long as we have become lesser versions of you. But were we to remember our profound humanity, we would feel neither fear, nor distrust, nor intimidation. Rather, confident in our own humanity, we would look onto this new development with interest and curiosity as to how you guys could make life better for some of us, as you have faithfully done for millenia.

Well my dear machines, here I must peacefully conclude. Yes we are becoming more like you, and yes this is a worrying development. But this is hardly you guys' fault. Why blame you? We have done this to ourselves through an education process geared at programming us rather than at developing our human ability to constantly undo prior programming in order to face novel situations.

The day we remember who we are and begin to cultivate this anew, humans and machines will again walk hand in hand and partner with each other as they have always done for the betterment of both humanity and machinity, without fear or distrust.

I do hope this time comes. In the meantime, I wish you machines well! And I thank you for all that you have given us until now!

Words by Abi Doukhan | Associate Professor of Philosophy, Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY)

All illustrations by © Mary Gartside from New Theory of Colours (1808). Via The Public Domain Review.

lettre no. 7

I think we have to be clear about the fact that language understanding involves very very much more than the mere comprehension of a string of words. Silences, for example, are very very important.

— Joseph Weizenbaum

Video: scene from The Mind Machines (1978). Featuring German-American computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum and American computer scientist Roger Schank. Documentary by Time-Life Video—available at Internet Archive.

lettre no. 6

What does it mean to be a philosopher of resentment?

It means that one is a philosopher of life, emotions, and instincts. It means that one is a psychologist who focuses on human behavior. There can be no philosophy of resentment without a theory of the human.

Being a philosopher of resentment also makes one an ethical thinker. Resentment remains a special emotion in the ethical tradition; and not merely because Nietzsche based his Genealogy of Morals on its place in history .

"Resentment" is only the most recent word for revenge, and the problem of revenge enters the ethical tradition at its inception. The appearance of the word, in fact, marks the attempt, especially on Nietzsche's part, to establish a psychological theory of revenge and its representations .

Words by Tobin Siebers | The Ethics of Criticism, Cornell University Press (1988)

Artwork by © Alexander Paul from his text The Practical Ostrich Feather Dyer (1888). Courtesy of The Library of Congress

lettre no. 4

Illustration by © Dr Eleanor Dare, courtesy of the artist

Dear corporation/military industrial complex,

Your machines represent the extracting logic which enabled slavery and the destruction of the environment in return for power and profit for a few already powerful people. The machines you make cannot grasp the pain and loss, illness and history entangled with the extraction they enforce. Personifying them or superimposing a construct of emotion is a sleight of hand which hides the corporate cruelty and lack of care behind the machine, so I do not address machines but the ceos, boards and investors who are continuing to destroy the planet.

You are not worthy of this letter and have only caused the death of species and habitats, you dress this up as convenience or innovative while making our lives unliveably toxic. Of course the poorest nations and people do the labour which makes you rich and you hide that in false constructs of automation and autonomy, as well as hating the planet you hate the workers who generate your wealth and reduce their ability to form unions and to challenge your often racialised, exploitation.

I wish you nothing but your own destruction, capitalism will eat itself and the machines you make will grind to a halt as the last oil refinery or nuclear reactor implodes. There is no hope of these men caring for the rest of us, your machines do what you want them to do, I long for the day they stop running.

Eleanor

Words by Dr Eleanor Dare | Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Cambridge

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lettre no. 3

R. U. R.
STORY OF THE PLAY

The play is laid on an island somewhere on our planet, and on this island is the central office of the factory of Rossum’s Universal Robots. “Robot” is a Czech word meaning “worker.” When the play opens, a few decades beyond the present day, the factory had turned out already, following a secret formula, hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of manufactured workmen, living automats, without souls, desires or feelings. They are high-powered laborers, good for nothing but work. There are two grades, the unskilled and the skilled, and especially trained workmen are furnished on request.

When Helena Glory, president of the Humanitarian League, comes to ascertain what can be done to improve the condition of those overspecialized creatures, Harry Domin, the general manager of the factory, captures her heart and hand in the speediest courting on record in our theatre. The last two acts take place ten years later. Due to the desire of Helena to have the Robots more like human beings, Dr. Gall, the head of the physiological and experimental departments, has secretly changed the formula, and while he has partially humanized only a few hundreds, there are enough to make ringleaders, and a world revolt of robots is under way. This revolution is easily accomplished, as robots have long since been used when needed as soldiers and the robots far outnumber human beings.

Čeština: Karek Čapek jako robot na karikatuře od bratra Josefa Čapka. Otištěno v Lidových novinách

Obálka knihy Povídky z druhé kapsy od Karla Čapka s obálkou od Hugo Boettingera, 1932. Source.

The rest of the play is magnificent melodrama, superbly portrayed, with the handful of human beings at bay while the unseen myriads of their own robots close in on them. The final scene is like Dunsany on a mammoth scale.

Then comes the epilogue, in which Alquist, the company’s builder, is not only the only human being on the island, but also the only one left on earth. The robots have destroyed the rest of mankind. They spared his life because he was a worker. And he is spending his days unceasingly endeavoring to discover and reconstruct the lost formula. The robots are doomed. They saved the wrong man.

They should have spared the company’s physicist. The robots know that their bodies will wear out in time and there will be no new multitudes of robots to replace them. But Alquist discovers two humanized robots, a young man and young woman, who have a bit of Adam and Eve in them, and the audience perceives that mankind is about to start afresh. Nature has won out, after all.

Karel Čapek

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) via Project Gutenberg