Learning, Gathering, and the Spectre of the LLM: Reading Group Sessions 2.1

What began as a conversation about minor literatures and the minoritarian use of language of the colonized subject turned, almost on its own, toward large language models, what they do with language, what they do to language, and what we are to make of tools that have ingested the very archives we were reading Rey Chow and Ariella Azoulay to think about.

For our next session, the question we are holding is this: What does AI, and the large language model in particular, mean for those of us engaged in para-institutional creative practices, and what are its perils and pitfalls? Is it a machine we can rewire toward our own desires, in the way la paperson’s scyborg rewires the colonial apparatus of knowledge (re-)production that is the university?

We will be meeting on Sunday, April 19th, from 2 to 4pm, at FLATLINE GALLERY (1925 N Milwaukee Ave).

To help us think, we will bring together five texts that approach the question from very different angles.

Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is one many of us have encountered before. Benjamin argues that mechanical reproduction detaches the work of art from ritual, strips it of aura, and opens it to politics. Rather than reading him as settled background, we can read him as the beginning of an arc we are still inside.

Ulysse Carrière’s “Technically Man Dwells upon this Earth” is a recent polemic that picks up Benjamin’s arc and pushes it toward automation. Carrière argues that most of what passes for art today is already automated in its logic, and that AI only makes this explicit while challenging us to make art otherwise.

Soetsu Yanagi’s “The Beauty of Miscellaneous Things,” from 1926, describes a phenomenology of making in which the maker is not a sovereign artist, repetition is not the enemy of creation, and beauty grows with use. In so doing, he gives us a vocabulary for a non-authoritative, non-authoritarian, non-authorial craft practice that the other texts struggle to find.

Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, from 1958, gives us a way of thinking about technical objects that refuses both technophobia and technophilia. In the excerpt we will read, he traces how the eighteenth-century craftsman experienced progress through the tool as an extension of the body, and how that experience broke down when the machine became a technical individual in its own right.

Finally, Ramon Amaro’s “Artificial Intelligence: Warped, Colorful Forms and Their Unclear Geometries” traces machine learning back to Laplace’s experiments on jury decisions and argues that the statistical apparatus was never neutral; he also calls for a practice of making, a Black Art, that refuses the machine’s terms without reaching for the classical subject or the innocent folk.

Read what you can. If you can only read two texts, we recommend reading Amaro alongside Carrière. Benjamin, Yanagi, and the Simondon excerpts are the shorter pieces and will reward whatever time you can give them.