Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas

Benjamin H. Bratton is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. His work is situated at the intersections of contemporary social and political theory, computational media and infrastructure, architectural and urban design, and the politics of synthetic ecologies and biologies. His forthcoming book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty will be published by MIT Press January 2016.

Orit Halpern (PhD) is a historian of science whose work bridges histories of computing and the human sciences with design and art practice. Her most recent book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke Press 2014) is a genealogy of interactivity and our contemporary obsessions with “big” data and data visualization. She is currently working on the history and political economy of ubiquitous computing, logistical systems, and responsive environments. She has also published and created works for a variety of venues including The Journal of Visual Culture, Public Culture, Configurations, C-theory, and ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. You can learn more at: www. orithalpern.net.

Adrian Lahoud is Director of the M.Arch Urban Design and Reader at Bartlett School of Architecture UCL and lecturer at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths. His research is situated between philosophy, architecture and digital design, and focuses on post-traumatic urbanism and forensic architecture among other topics. Recently his work has been published in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, The Journal of Architecture, Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence, New Geographies, and Performing Trauma.

Jon Lindblom is currently writing a thesis on the cultural implications of the scientific image of man, with a particular focus on the relationship between technology and cognition in the Visual Cultures Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. https://technihil.wordpress.com/.

Catherine Malabou is professor in the philosophy department at the centre for research in modern European philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University London. Her research has evolved around the term “plasticity” with regards to Hegel, medical science, stem cells, and neuroplasticity, among others. Her last book Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (Columbia University 2013) was published with Adrian Johnson. Her next book Avant Demain, Epigenèse et rationalité (Paris, 2014) wil be published with Polity Press in 2016.

Reza Negarestani is a philosopher. His current philosophical project is focused on rationalist universalism beginning with the evolution of the modern system of knowledge and advancing toward contemporary philosophies of rationalism.

Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Theory, Chair of the PhD programme at the Centre for Cultural Studies, and co-director of the Digital Culture Unit, Goldsmiths University of London. Her research develops philosophical conceptions of matter and thought in the context of technocapitalist investments in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology. Currently she is working on the history of automation and the philosophical consequences of logical thinking in machines. Her last book was Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (MIT Press 2013).

Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer from Lisbon based in Berlin currently lecturing at UdK (Universität der Künste). Her work has been published in publications such as e-flux Journal, Art-Agenda, Mousse, Frieze, Domus, Inaesthetics, The Manifesta Journal, or Text zur Kunst.

Michael Wheeler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. His primary research interests are in philosophy of science (especially cognitive science, psychology, biology and artificial intelligence) and philosophy of mind. His book, Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step, was published by MIT Press in 2005.

Charles T. Wolfe is a researcher at Ghent University, Belgium, working primarily in history and philosophy of the early modern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism. His edited volumes include Monsters and Philosophy (2005), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge (2010, with O. Gal), Vitalism and the scientific image in post-Enlightenment life-science (2013, with S. Normandin) and Brain Theory (2014); he has papers in journals including Multitudes, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology and others

Ben Woodard is a PhD student in Theory and Criticism at Western University. His work focuses on the naturalism of FWJ von Schelling and the status of nature in contemporary philosophy. He is most recently the author of On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (Punctum, 2013).