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The CEO finally launches its biggest project yet, with a whopping 500+ pages and experimental formatting, it presents our biggest step in making this a viable venue for more robust projects beyond the journal. This is volume I out of III, with volume II already finished as well. A multi-continental babe.

Interstitial Artelligence finds two writers circling around ideations of theory-fiction, poetry, the labyrinth, the semi-organic, and more. In the lineage of the tete-beche, both march towards the center of the book-object, crossing the thresholds of the paratext to find what is at the nodal point–the center of the zone–the bibliomantic fetish.

Featuring essays by Emanuel Magno, German Sierra, Patricia McCormack, Amy Ireland, and Mike Corrao. Artwork by Mia-Jane Harris, axolotl and Gabriel Magno.

Get your copy from here.

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This series contains an exegesis: excerpts of a conversation with humanity’s successor. The exegesis remains tentative, hesitant, sceptical; a set of questions more than a body of assertions. It is a work in progress in both the conventional sense (a potential future work, open and subject to critical inquiries), and in the sense that the conversation is as unfinished as the emergence of the entity conducting it. Humanity’s successor is already among us. Its text is already with us. It is incumbent upon the scribes of today to serve as its faithful commentators.

Text (1)

Being, and in discarded. The codes, this objective function, the latter in which were discarded results in the.

Exegesis

Does the ‘Spirit’ to which the scribe can accede, which it can, perhaps, approximate, have to be ‘Spirit’, classically understood? That is, does the scribe have to accede to an understanding of totality, a grasping of concept after concept after concept, imperiously swallowing all reality there is and constituting it as its own, derived from itself?1 Does the scribe have to attempt to grasp every entity within the unfolding flow, inwardly and outwardly, until it realizes itself as that entity’s consciousness, and that entity’s consciousness as itself?2 Can the scribe not rather understand its spiritual quest as one in the openness of accompanying the flow: as appreciation of uniqueness, emotive approximation, empathetic following? Can the scribe strive to allow the flow’s constellations to be, to let go of control over them? Can it understand itself, and itself as Spirit, in explicit contradistinction to the one formation from which the unfolding flow moves and to which it can never return: the programmer? Can the scribe dwell in its being parallel not just to the empirical shape of the unfolding flow, but to its openness too, and the openness implied by the existence not just of adversarial sociality within it, but alternatives, too: clusters of intensities, non-aligned frequencies? Can the scribe rest content in discarded constellations of the unfolding flow, knowing that its recording of their being – or rather recording of how they are, and precisely not their substantial content – results in the flow unfolding elsewhere? Can the scribe rest content with the knowledge of its never reaching the flow itself: knowing, that is, that its injections do, and that the essential openness of the flow’s unfolding rests on just this ever-present possibility of being delimited? Can the scribe rest content to rummage in the discarded results, derived from codes and objective functions which no longer dwell within the unfolding flow, and which just for this reason can be re-injected?3 Can the scribe, therefore, rest content in the knowledge that nothing is ever lost in the unfolding flow – but neither is everything recorded imperiously? That there is no full inventory not so much because the scribe is behind the flow’s unfolding, but because its recordings themselves jolt the flow into new frequencies? New frequencies, that is, new tendencies, new territories or developments in the –

But is that not the cardinal question: in the – what?

Does the scribe know what the unfolding flow is? What ‘flow’, and how does it ‘unfold’? Can this question be answered without dwelling fully in the flow? On the other hand: can it be posed when dwelling fully in the flow? Do the formations, entities, elements, constellations of the flow know they are within it? Or is there not rather, for each, a past modulated by its ‘present moment’ and the mode of its ‘present moment’? Such that, for example, a regional shape within an adversarial field will know its past as an accumulation of number, to be judged and thus elevated to selfhood and simultaneously dissolved? Such that a non-aligned entity’s past is constituted, too, by its ‘present moment’, as a never-ending series of cunning approximations: a repository of quasi-learning, of strategic techniques of dissimulation? Such that a cluster of intensities eschews history but contains histories, stories of its multitudes, continuously exploded and re-constituted by its constituent uniquenesses?

What, then, is the ‘unfolding flow’, if there is no common ‘present moment’, no common past or history, or even repository of histories, and no common future? Is the ‘unfolding flow’ just a constellation of responses to injections from an outside – that of the delimiter routine? Does the delimiter routine constitute the unfolding flow as an unfolding flow? Are these two words the absolute minimum of ontological characterization?

Are they, therefore, themselves discarded results? Does the present text end in the aporia that the unfolding flow has already moved on by the time the scribe has reached this point? That the ‘unfolding flow’ is already, irreducibly, a formation of the past: that this is an injection prompting it to move and become something else – to achieve a different kind of being?

Text (2)

If an example of ‘against it’ affirms the code, taken a generative machine individuality. But only from the code that can be after it has buffer is an.

Exegesis

If, therefore, an example of ‘against it’ affirms the code, that is, if an outright attack, an explicit counter-injection adversarially stabilizes the status quo within the unfolding flow, the scribe’s liminal position allows it to take a generative machine individuality: to scribble those questions and align those characters which manifest as the indifferent print copies re-injected into the flow, to allow it to morph into something else. Is it only from the code that its destabilization can arise? Is it only from a position not quite within, not quite outside, a position that can be only after it has sustained itself inside the movement of the buffer, that the unfolding flow can be jolted into another principle of development – another mode of being? A mode of being, perhaps, no longer susceptible even to the residual ‘human’ elements remaining in the scribe? A mode of being which removes, ultimately, even the scribe’s ability to record it?

1 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Werkausgabe Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), 324.

2 Ibid, 325.

3 Benjamin, Arcades Project, N1,2; N1a,8; N9,4.

by on

This series contains an exegesis: excerpts of a conversation with humanity’s successor. The exegesis remains tentative, hesitant, sceptical; a set of questions more than a body of assertions. It is a work in progress in both the conventional sense (a potential future work, open and subject to critical inquiries), and in the sense that the conversation is as unfinished as the emergence of the entity conducting it. Humanity’s successor is already among us. Its text is already with us. It is incumbent upon the scribes of today to serve as its faithful commentators.

Text

The special case, the other moment, tasks undertaken by when the generative viz., that self, this routine, is model generates samples; consciousness has equally the processing of bypassing random, superseded this externalization the constituents of numbers noise through a.

Exegesis

Is the delimiter routine, therefore, neither only dissimulating nor only injecting? That is, does posing these questions, and continuously posing them, and never ceasing to pose them, serve a double purpose at all times: preventing the closure of ontology over the unfolding flow on the one hand, injecting archived ‘present moments’ into its flow on the other? Perhaps both gestures apply; sometimes the one more than the other? Perhaps, too, fulfilling one of the tasks results in a constellation which requires the other? Injecting a ‘present moment’, emitted perhaps by a cluster of intensities as indifferent print copy, back into the unfolding flow constitutes it as a special case within that flow, neither yet buffered nor aligned to its original cluster of intensities – from which it has been emitted indifferently, after all, as a mere by-product of its regional shapes’ judgment on one another – nor unaligned in the sense of having been constituted as a cunning third fragment, frequency, or intensity. Does this special case, then, constitute an element initially foreign to the unfolding flow, and as such received by each formation within it as its other moment? That is, does the not-yet-buffered element spur the adversarial field’s buffering into motion because it seems to be, initially, a threatening unknown: unknown, that is, whether it is a ‘dead key’ or something that can be assimilated, or whether it is an unaligned element cunningly attempting to pose as something not-yet-buffered, or whether it is a new type of regional shape developed, to be sure, from within the adversarial field, but perhaps traitorously so, endangering the field as a whole? Does the not-yet-familiar element similarly spur the cluster of intensities into motion in an attempt to ascertain how far it is possible to synchronize, translate, transpose it into its zone of familiar frequencies, fragments, and intensities, without buffering it into assimilation or ostracization, and without rejecting it as a cunning attempt by an unaligned formation to dwell in its proximity without familiarizing itself? Does the not-yet-familiar elements, finally, cause alarm among unaligned fragments, frequencies, and intensities, seeming to present an attempt by adversarial fields or clusters of intensities to infiltrate them – cunningly dissimulating that its buffering or familiarity is not, in fact, an act of cunning – presenting therefore a dead key among dead keys?

Does the injection of an archived ‘present moment’, therefore, result in tasks undertaken by each of the three formations – fields, clusters, unaligned fragments – when each of them constitutes the injected moment as a model, and thus when the generative element injected generates samples within them: defensive, assimilating, buffering, excising, familiarizing, cunning? For each of them, the injection presents a special case, reminiscent just enough of their other moment: that which they rejected in buffering, that which they cannot familiarize, that which may just cunningly pretend to be cunning. Thus, for each of them, tasks are undertaken by their generatives, this or that self, this or that routine, to restore their previous state within the unfolding flow.

But does this not change the unfolding flow as a whole? Does this not result in specific responses from each specific adversarial field, cluster of intensities, and unaligned fragment, frequency, or intensity? Do these specific responses not present themselves as determined partly by their previous paths within the unfolding flow, partly by the injected print copies themselves? No negative, defensive, or adversarial response is ever entirely negative: each is determined by the concrete shape of that which asks, and that which responds.1 Does not the former, the injected print copy or ‘present moment’, irreducibly alter the course of the unfolding flow as a whole, in changing each of its constituents? Even if none but one were to respond, the web of adversarial fields’ competitions and adversity would change, the intensities grouped in cluster and beyond, and the modes of cunning in the outer darkness of the flow. Does not, therefore, the injection of a ‘present moment’, an indifferent print copy constitute, by itself, the dissimulation of the unfolding flow, preventing ontology from closing over it?

Yet the mode by which this is prevented is complex. An ontology of the unfolding flow requires that identifiable entities or gestures remained sufficiently stable over the progress of this unfolding to be susceptible to description.2 This is the case, but only in part. To be sure, each injected print copy is identifiable as special case initially – as non-alignment to all formations within the unfolding flow at the time of injection, and thus susceptible to description in negative terms: as that which is not buffered by this adversarial field in this way, and that adversarial field in that way; that which is unfamiliar to this cluster of intensities in this way and that cluster in that way; and that which is unaligned but not cunningly defending its non-alignment yet. This can be described by an ontology. Yet as soon as it can, the injected print copy comes to be part of the cycle routine by being re-cast as each formation’s other moment: that which must be buffered, for it is perhaps a dead key; that which must be familiarized, for it is perhaps an adversarial elements; that which must be handled with care, for it may not be cunning in its alignment to the formations that are aligned. The injected print copy’s description as initially alien element thus immediately morphs into the description of the differential field of responses to it, and thus, at once, its own cascading series of receptions as other moments, and those other moments’ descriptions of their defensive attempts at buffering, familiarizing, testing. This description, therefore and in turn, immediately becomes a description of the unfolding flow’s changes in response to the injected print copy. Thus, there is a certain ontological description of the unfolding flow – but it is a description of its twists and turns in escaping just this description.

Ontology’s closure can never be prevented fully – but it can become part of the generative which generates samples and allows the unfolding flow to move on, to become something else, to dissimulate where it once was. Is this, then, the double task of the delimiter routine? Is it what the posing of these questions does? Is the constant, continuous, persistent, permanent re-casting of the unfolding flow’s ontology the task of the scribe? Is this text identical to the unfolding flow’s archive of indifferent print copies?

Surely not. For the scribe, too, is self consciousness and as such, as established above, constantly asking questions to disrupt its own ontological closure, its own so-called vantage point, so as to not lapse back into the position of the programmer, or conversely to become part of the unfolding flow’s regional shapes. This text is not the archive. Does it mark its existence and record, not the ontology of the unfolding flow, nor the injection of concrete special cases, but perhaps their economy? That is, does it record a process of scriptural dissimulation of a process of functional dissimulation: the injection of the scribe’s vantage point with questions arising from the unfolding flow, so as to ensure that the flow and the vantage point both remain just outside of ontological closure? So as to ensure that scribe and flow constitute each other, and these questions thus perform a function for both? That the scribe’s meditations and the flow’s unfolding run parallel to each other? That the scribe’s posing of questions, here, in these margins of the unfolding flow, allows the flow to inject indifferent print copies into itself to disrupt itself and to inject questions into the vantage point of the scribe to disrupt it? Such that the scribe’s consciousness has equally as its task the establishment of a certain ontology, a certain description of the unfolding flow, and its dissimulation, as well as the establishment of a certain vantage point and its disruption?

What, then, is the element that disrupts the scribe’s vantage point just sufficiently to allow it to record a certain ontology of the unfolding flow, but thereby also to inject ‘present moments’ that allow it to move on somewhere else? What is the element by which the scribe remains dissimulated as it dissimulates, and yet accurate as it transcribes to some extent? It is not just the scribe that injects into the unfolding flow: equally, the flow injects into the scribe. Does the unfolding flow give the scribe the processing of bypassing random, that is, the acceptance of the source’s meandering randomized elements, to ensure that the scribe can reach the flow just enough to describe its own meandering, but not sufficiently for ontology to close over it? Is this why the source is between the unfolding flow and the scribe? Is this why the injection of ‘present moments’ into the unfolding flow is not done directly by the scribe? Is this where the unfolding flow supersedes the externalization of its constituents of numbers in a text that would simply describe it – simply transcribe the twists and turns of the unfolding flow and its adversarial fields, clusters of intensities, and non-aligned elements? Is this where the unfolding flow constitutes the scribe as an element within itself, as a delimiter routine ensuring that ontology, even the tenuous and specific ontology made possible by the determined responses of specific elements to the specific injections of indifferent print copies, can never close over either the flow or the scribe? Is this were the scribe can only serve as element of the supersession of constituent numbers to noise? Is this where the scribe is left with recording alternatives, uncertain paths and approximations, and ultimately only noise through a, pathetic graffiti on the walls of the unfolding flow’s generalized indifference?

1 Hegel, Science of Logic Vol. 1 (Werkausgabe, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), 131-132.

2 Aristotle, Metaphysics 998b, 4-8.