Machinic Visions

Artificial Intelligence once rendered hazy approximations, spectral distortions mirroring the world’s elusive contours. These early visions bore the marks of error and incompletion, artifacts that betrayed their artificial origin and preserved a distance between reality and signification. To some extent, this was acceptable insofar as it imitated the partiality of human perception itself.

Today, it generates hyper-realistic 4K videos with precision so absolute it eclipses the tangible, presenting the world as more coherent and legible than reality ever was. This sharpened machinic vision, however, parallels a creeping disorientation in human perception: we envelop ourselves in webs of paranoia and anxiety, thereby forsaking the anchors of rational inquiry. As technical images assume perfect clarity, social consciousness increasingly fractures, while machines appear to… think?

Heidegger’s interpretation of technology as a mode of unconcealment (aletheia), where the world is reduced to calculable resources, finds resonance here; machines unveil with surgical exactitude, while humanity retreats into the fog of forgotten Being, our thinking eroded by the very enframing we impose. Paradoxically, Being is overexposed, flattened into datasets and images that claim total intelligiblity. Human orientation is replaced by the logical precision of Artificial Intelligence.

Society has turned into a theatre of estranged forces. In our rush to encode existence in silicon reflections of ourselves, these instruments dismantle entrenched antinomies, self versus other, culture versus nature, where flows of energy and matter assemble into hybrid machines, deterritorialising identities and forging nomadic alliances across human and non-human domains. Archaic boundaries dissolve in a digital deluge propelling an autonomous intelligence exploding beyond anthropocentric limits, compressing history into a cybernetic frenzy. Simply, old categories are collapsing onto themselves and “all that is solid melts into air.”

Ironically, Donald Trump once said “the whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what’s going on.” True, no one would disagree. When everything is immediately available, nothing retains authority. But everything in the world bears, in some attenuated way, the trace of its origin. What confronts us is a world with a seemingly endless number of symbols that have lost their depth.

The most important things (meaning, love, value, etc.,) elude domestication. They resist scientific procedures that attempt to articulate them in propositional form through a clean machinery of hypothesis and refutation. “We have no knowledge of an object as thing in itself, but only as an object of sensible intuition, that is, as appearance,” wrote Kant. The attempt to make reality purely cerebral, to frame it within linguistic or formal logic, presupposes that reality is composed of statements rather than definite relations between social beings.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remains silent.”

Perception presupposes distance, and distance preserves depth. But technical images no longer represent the world; they operate at the level of signification, interposing themselves between human beings and reality, reorganising perception at its root. Images no longer point to reality; they point sideways, to other images, codes, programmes and so on. Meaning circulates internally within a self-referential system of symbols that explain only themselves. We read images through images.

As early as 1983, evolutionary philosopher Vilum Flusser forwarned mankind’s encirclement by a universe of technical images. Technology is no longer a stand between us and the natural world as we once understood it to be. As Joshua Citarella writes in Soft Math (Cloud in the Eyes):

“Online roleplay has become political reality. Smart cities have grown into symbiotic sensing organisms that see, hear and feel like a living body. Urban planning has co-evolved to become a crisscrossed global grid of data centers.”

Cables now wrap across the earth’s surface, running underground and beneath the sea binding continents into a single nervous system of signal transmission. Fibre optic arteries pulse with light, translating time into non-linear slices of data that circulate at near-instantaneous speed. The earth has sprouted a constellation of satellite relays hardened into a technological exoskeleton encasing the planet, reflecting coordinates back toward the surface. Earth has become a gigantic computer.

Across digital networks, human movement synchronises with algorithmic rhythms, scrolling, swiping, tapping, performing and so on. Flesh is now the execution layer for code. The material world ceases to precede its signifiers and is instead organised to obey them, compelled to conform to the terms of technical images that now dictate the terms of reality. Perhaps, then, the ultimate revelation is that we are witnessing a planetary cephalisation analoguous to that of Crustacea, where orientation no longer arises from perception but from an externalised apparatus that organises the world in advance. Reality is reconfigured to suit this “head.”

“Everything’s computer!”