Carrier-bag Staff

Conference Tue, June 3, 17.30-21 and Wed, June 4, 12-19 at AdBK Munich, Akademiestraße 2, Central Lecture Hall, free admission  With: Gregory Chatonsky, Simon Denny, Navine G. Dossos, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Mat Dryhurst, Constant Dullaart, Antonio Somaini  There is a strange disconnect in tech’s recent effects on politics and culture.

Art in the Age of Average. The new AI-thoritarians.

“Noise in the sense of a large number of small events is often a causal factor much more powerful than a small number of large events can be. Noise makes trading in financial markets possible, and thus allows us to observe prices for financial assets… We are forced to act…

In 1986, Fischer Black, one of the founders of contemporary finance, made a rather surprising announcement: bad data, incomplete information, wrong decisions, excess data, and fake news, all make arbitrage possible. In the famous article

 Noise

, Black posited that we trade and profit from misinformation and information overload.

Financializing Intelligence. On the Integration of Machines and Markets

“The claws were bad enough in the first place – nasty, crawling little death-robots. But when they began to imitate their creators, it was time for the human race to make peace – if it could! […] Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight…

Second Variety

is a science novel by American writer Philip K. Dick set in a world where war between the Soviet Union and the United Nations has reduced most of the world to a bare wasteland.

Combat at Gamer’s Pace – No Pause nor Reset Button. The image-space of contemporary warfare

RYBN

Introduction

 Human Computers

is a media archaeology research that aims to unravel the intricate entanglement between computing and capitalism through the prism of labor.

Human computers, the labourious history of computing

AI has played a pivotal role in Israel’s war in the Gaza strip since October 7

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2023, when Hamas militants massacred 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers and took more than 250 hostage (CNN 2025).  Reporting by Israeli and international news outlets have detailed how large language models and predictive analytics are helping to determine when and where bombs fall from the sky and troops shoot on the ground (Abraham 2024).

Killing at Scale

Overture

Over the last few years, I have been researching the militarized Kurdish landscape through a triangle of affinities linking the machine, the animal and the human. The interaction between the militaristic, the natural and the cultural unfolds as a sonic battle on the colonized landscape. Sonic booms, bird calls and songs of resistance echo in the same valleys.

Verbal Bombs and Sonic Memory of the Mountains

To say that ours are darkening times is to acknowledge, that the present moment – the year is 2025 – is increasingly characterised by familiar modes of authoritarian oppression, of right-wing political cruelty and of inevitably rising geopolitical tensions in the context of which nuclear Armageddon and the necessity for autonomous weapon systems are frequently conjured up,  often in the same breath.

Eichmann’s inheritance – On AI and autonomous weapons in a darkening world

As my title suggests, the focus of this essay is not drones per se, but rather the wider turn to algorithmic warfare that they enable and of which they remain a key part, from surveillance operations to targeted assassination.

The Criminal Imprecision of Algorithmic Warfare

Somewhere in Germany there is a securitized data server that holds one of the world’s most comprehensive archives of propaganda videos produced by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), an extremist jihadist militant group that gained international notoriety in the mid-2010s for its sensationalist use of media violence to spread its ideology.

Seeing without Seeing – Towards a Generative Archival Practice

Neither natural nor intelligent  ‘Artificial intelligence’ (AI) is such a large, dynamic, and vaguely defined field that much of what can be said about it is both true and false, or no longer true or possibly not yet true.

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