Please find below my response to A Questionnaire on Art and Machine Learning published in the current issue of October magazine. The text was also translated into German and published as "Ein Begehren namens Synthese," in TEXT+KRITIK: Das Subjekt des Schreibens--Über Große Sprachmodelle, edited by Hannes Bajohr and Moritz Hiller.

Today's artificial intelligence is a tool for generating new numbers from patterns in massive piles of old numbers. Given the recent ebullience around AI, it's important not to lose sight of this. These tools are no doubt dazzling, but they are essentially next-word predictors, or next-pixel predictors. I stress today's because the history is important. Modern research into artificial intelligence began, in the decades after World War II, by using approaches grounded in logic and symbolic rationality. After this early approach largely failed, leading to an "AI winter," engineers eventually retooled with data-driven and empirical methods. Concurrent with this new wave came an unprecedented proliferation of human data via emailing, blogging, the authoring of HTML, the snapping of digital photos, etc., much of which was posted publicly or accessible internally to the cloud platforms that hosted it all. This data furnished the fuel for today's data-centric AI.

One consequence of this history is a shift in the balance between data and algorithms. Software development entails a variety of different kinds of input data (global variables, input files and databases, graphical elements for the user interface, essentially anything that can't be generated procedurally). At the same time, development requires a complex set of procedures (function calls, simple arithmetical and logical operations, if/then control structures). For many years, the normal way to do software development was to have a relatively small amount of data and a relatively large number of procedures. "Normal" is often a contested word, to be sure. But I mean everything from when Linus Torvalds built the Linux kernel to when Cory Arcangel wrote the assembly code for Super Mario Clouds. Today's AI essentially rearranges the previous proportion. Instead of a few variables and data inputs appended to a more prolonged set of procedures, we find massive amounts of data paired with a relatively small codebase. Sure, the code repository at OpenAI or Google is large, but their data stores are almost immeasurably larger. In fact, you or I could program a simple machine-learning algorithm in just a few hundred lines of code. Today's AI is not algorithmically elaborate, even if it remains data intensive. The data is heavy and the procedures are light. Continue reading →

Please join me this Saturday, October 19 for a screening and discussion on "Error, Noise, & Randomness." I'll be talking with Whit Pow as part of Open Circuits Revisited at EAI in New York

Alexander Galloway x Whit Pow: Error, Noise, & Randomness
3:00-5:00pm
EAI

More Info

RSVP (in-person)

Livestream link

This was sent to NYU administration this morning. The MCC departmental faculty vote was 22 supporting no confidence and 1 against.

We, the faculty of the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, in the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development have no confidence in the leadership of Linda Mills, President of New York University, and her accompanying administration.

Mills and her administration called on the NYPD to arrest NYU students and faculty peacefully protesting and participating in an encampment, on April 22 and on May 3, 2024. Her actions have endangered academic freedom and the safety of our community.

MCC furthermore calls on the administration to drop all disciplinary and criminal charges against students and faculty involved in the April 22 and May 3 encampments.

April 26, 2024

Dear President Mills and Provost Dopico,

As faculty members in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, we condemn the decision by you and your administration to forcibly remove and arrest 120 students and faculty in Gould Plaza on the night of Monday, April 22. We affirm the right of peaceful assembly and protest on the NYU campus.

As 44 department chairs and program directors have now attested, the protest was peaceful. There was no threat to public safety, no outside activists, nor were there any suggestions of bigotry among the protesters. We request that the administration's claims of anti-semitism or conduct amounting to hateful treatment be rigorously substantiated, rather than being allowed to remain in the domain of rumor, where they are used to authorize extraordinary actions whose damage to the reputation of this university will be long-lasting and even irrecoverable. Throughout the day, NYU campus security made the environment more and more repressive by putting up barricades, filming protesters, and not allowing students and faculty into the plaza. The violence escalated further with the arrival of the armed and armored NYPD, who were hostile and intimidating toward protesters, some of which were engaged in prayer. With a phalanx of cop vans lining Greene Street in front of our department, and a police helicopter hovering overhead, followed by an increased carceral climate in the days since--including new ID checks and a wall--you and your administration are making it more and more difficult to teach and work at NYU.

Despite the climate of hostility in recent days, let us not forget the real reason why students and faculty are protesting. As the International Court of Justice ruled in January, Israel's destruction of Gaza amounts to “plausible genocide.” Over 33,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military over the last seven months in Gaza. As for university life there, it no longer exists. Every single university in Gaza has been destroyed by bombs. Palestinian students don't have the luxury of protesting because so many of them are dead.

We call on you to drop all charges and threats of recrimination against any NYU person participating in Monday's action, previous actions, and the ongoing movement for peace and justice in Palestine. Instead we hope that you will protect and support all members of the NYU community, particularly students whose visa status may put them at risk, as well as contract and untenured faculty and staff, who are especially susceptible to acts of retaliation by the administration.

Protest and political speech have been a valuable part of campus life in America for generations, at NYU and elsewhere. From Black and women's liberation, to queer and trans movements, to struggles for Indigenous rights and recognition, to anti-capitalism and environmentalism, along with many other movements, students and faculty have long been an important voice for peace and justice. NYU’s proud claim to be “in and of the city” rests on its affiliations with these movements. We hope you will redirect your administrative priorities away from criminalizing protesters and building walls, and toward the higher virtues of peace and democratic freedom.

Sincerely,

The undersigned faculty in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication:

Isra Ali
Jamie Skye Bianco
Paula Chakravartty
Lily Chumley
Allen Feldman
Nicole R. Fleetwood
Alexander R. Galloway
Brett J. Gary
Lisa Gitelman
Radha S. Hegde
Ted Magder
Mara Mills
Nicholas Mirzoeff
Kelli Moore
Susan Murray
Laine Nooney
Juan Piñón
Whit Pow
Arvind Rajagopal
Erica Robles-Anderson
Martin R. Scherzinger
Natasha D. Schüll
Marita Sturken
Helga Tawil-Souri
j. Siguru Wahutu
​​Angela Xiao Wu

(Previously) ...Next, the mea culpa. It concerns Badiou's position on the Continuum Hypothesis. In 1878 Georg Cantor offered a hypothesis about the continuum, essentially a hypothesis about the nature of continuous number. More specifically the hypothesis concerned Cantor's famous two sizes of infinity and the relation between them. After establishing the position of the smaller infinity, the infinity of rational or arithmetical number, Cantor hypothesized that the "next highest" number would be his larger infinity, the infinity of real or geometric number. I write next highest in scare quotes because the question of size and even counting itself stops making intuitive sense after transgressing the threshold of finitude.

If you're looking for a more technical statement of the CH, here is a helpful one by Mary Tiles from her excellent book The Philosophy of Set Theory: An Historical Introduction to Cantor's Paradise (p. 1):

"2^ℵ₀ = ℵ₁, which has come to be known as Cantor's continuum hypothesis, thus says that the number of points on a line is the second infinite cardinal number: there are none in between ℵ₀ and 2^ℵ₀."

Okay, so the CH has a long history in mathematics and I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of the underlying math is wobbly at best. But let's establish the basics at the outset. Continue reading →

Now that Andrew and I have posted all episodes of the Being & Event podcast, I wanted to return to two details from the series and offer a bit more explanation. The first (here below) will expand on something from Episode 3. The second, in a future post, will address something I said about Badiou, which, it turns out, has been directly contradicted by Badiou himself! In other words, a mea culpa is in order. More on that soon.

To recap, in Episode 3, I made three observations about Badiou to help structure the discussion. The first observation was a point about politics, that Badiou is essentially a modernist, and specifically that he is a political modernist. The second was a point about math: that Badiou gives us not just a description of mathematics but a definition of mathematics. I articulated that definition across different episodes in the podcast series, and also wrote about it here, giving it the name Badiou's Principle. The third point was about technology, a point that may be posed as a question: Is Badiou a digital philosopher? I want to say yes, at least to some degree. And that question deserves a longer post all on its own. Regardless, any discussion of whether or not Badiou is a digital philosopher stumbles over an awkward truth. Badiou hardly ever talks about the digital. Badiou hardly ever ever about computers. This philosopher, known the world over for his overweening interest in mathematics and formalization, has only rarely addressed the most important instance of mathematical formalism in the world today, namely digital computation. Why is this? Continue reading →

For my German friends.. here is an interview conducted by Oliver Leistert and Mary Shnayien and recently published in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft.

«Ob man etwas tun kann oder nicht, ist eine rein mechanische oder materielle Frage»

Zu den Politiken und Effekten von Internetprotokollen und den Möglichkeiten ihrer Historisierung

Galloway-interview-in-Zeitschrift-für-Medienwissenschaft.pdf

Uncomputable has recently been translated and published in Korean by Rose & Camellia. My friend Taeyoon Choi has written a letter of introduction for the book for Korean audiences.

알렉산더 R. 갤러웨이의 『계산할 수 없는』이 한국어로 출간된다는 소식을 듣고 무척 기뻤다. 나의 멘토이자 소중한 동지인 갤러웨이와는 짧지 않은 시간 동안 코딩과 액티비즘, 미학과 철학 그리고 추상화와 실천의 접점에서 대화를 이어갔다. 우리의 인연은 내가 예술가 활동을 시작하던 2008년 봄, 뉴욕 첼시에 위치한 아이빔 아트 앤 테크놀로지 센터Eyebeam Art and Technology Center의 레저던시에 참여했던 경험에서 출발한다. 당시 갤러웨이는 몇 명의 프로그래머, 디자이너들과 함께 이 책에서 소개되는 크릭슈필Kriegspiel 게임을 만들고 있었다. 기 드보르Guy Debord가 디자인한 보드 게임을 온라인 게임으로 새로 만든다는 이야기를 듣고 고전 게임 매니아들인가보다 생각했지만, 갤러웨이의 게임과 소프트웨어, 네트워크 연구에 담긴 미학적, 정치적 의미에 대해 조금씩 알게 되면서 그의 작업 전반에 걸쳐 흥미를 가지게 되었다. [Continue Reading]

This talk has been *rescheduled* -- it's now happening on April 25 at 5pm Pacific (8pm Eastern). I'll be focusing specifically on building/rebuilding things (based on material from Uncomputable).

Please join the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford for a presentation titled "Crystals, Genes, and Wool: Three Case Studies in Algorithmic Re-enactment" by Alexander R. Galloway, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. This free event will take place on Zoom on Tuesday, April 25th, from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm PDT.

An algebraic textile pattern from 1947, a cellular automata simulation from 1953, a tabletop game from 1977 – in this online workshop, we will explore three lost or otherwise overlooked pieces of code from the deep history of computational culture. Using an experimental method dubbed "algorithmic re-enactment," we will study these artifacts in their own historical context, while also bringing them to life again using current tools.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford. Please see the flyer and brief bio below for more information, and RSVP here to receive a Zoom link by email.

Launch Event -- Zoom Registration

Please join us on April 10 to launch the Being & Event Podcast. Over nine episodes, Andrew Culp & Alexander R. Galloway offer a close reading of philosopher Alain Badiou's major treatise Being and Event (1988) followed by special guest interviews.

Listen to the first two episodes via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other platforms.

New episodes will be released weekly during Spring 2023.