22
Dec
Excerpt from the so-called Dresden Codex – an ancient Mayan book on astronomical calculations. Pages 55-58.

On Hui’s Recursivity, Contingency, and Cosmotechnics

I just finished my belated reading of Yuk Hui’s Recursivity and Contingency (2019). I wished I had read it before or during my PhD work, but I simply didn’t get around to it. It’s really a great and illuminating work. I myself have argued elsewhere that cybernetic thinking can be thought of much as Simondon […]

Specimens, n-grams, and LLMs

Also at the Semiotic Machines conference a few weeks ago, the US scholar Lisa Gitelman made a very interesting connection between early type specimens – the booklets published by type foundries both to advertise and demonstrate how to compose text with their typefaces (see Reynolds 2022) – and contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs). According to […]

Thinking about Making (Thinking Machines)

Last week I attended the Semiotic Machines conference here in Berlin. At the opening panel on the first day, the philosopher Beatrice Fazi said something that intrigued me and has kept me thinking ever since. She said – I’m paraphrasing from memory here – that in order to address the challenges that AI systems pose […]