Machine Reveries and the Possibility of Thought Beyond the Human Body

Jack Booth (alum Berlin ’19) published his essay ‘Machine Reveries and the Possibility of Thought Beyond the Human Body’ for the Spring ’20 issue of Strelka Magazine.

“Machine-machine vision—a parallel visual culture developed by machines, for machines—is testing the boundaries of what we consider thought.” – Jack Booth

In the essay Jack examines how ‘…In his 1987 essay “Can Thought Go On Without A Body?” the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard saw thought as inseparable from the body; the body is the hardware in which the software—thought—exists. Hardware, however, can become faulty, whilst software can be updated and transferred to a different host.’

Mario Klingemann. Interstitial Space, 2019. Courtesy of the artist / Sotheby’s

In the piece Jack goes on to examine ‘…if the field of machine-machine vision represented by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) offers a challenge to Lyotard’s claim that thought and body are inseparable, and by doing so will discuss the limits of this type of artificial intelligence.’

Read it in full here.

 

About Jack Booth

Jack Booth is a London-based writer. Current research interests include 1970s Britain, particularly the uptake of cybernetic thought in community and activist collectives and their relationship to the development of the “third sector.” He completed his undergraduate degree at Goldsmiths and his master’s was in Film Studies at University College London.