The research project led by Antonia Majaca investigates how unexpected forms of collective intelligence emerge against the backdrop of the epistemic regime of data positivism, algorithmic classification and prediction. The project starts from a demand to rethink the specificity of and relations among notions such as intelligence, technology, planetarity and general intellect, while considering what unique cognitive and political capacities are needed to grapple with the link between the breakdown of earth systems and the proliferation of planetary-scale digital technologies. The thesis of the forthcoming edited volume, Incomputable Earth: Digital Technologies and the Anthropocene, due to be published by Bloomsbury, supposes that calling the new geological era “Anthropocene” implies that the Earth has been rendered artificial by the impact of humanity. Thus, a specific focus on understanding this process is needed. This book looks at how the capitalist engineering of this “artificial earth” has accelerated over recent decades, in parallel with the expansion of digital technological systems. A central focus is artificial intelligence, itself a technology of extraction—from the earth minerals to the labor of low-wage information workers. Thus, the book calls for a radical break with a conception of intelligence and value based on instrumentality and extraction. This entails a radical epistemic shift based on abolishing the patriarchal gendering of both technology and nature and involves a multifaceted but fundamentally materialist critique of the current theoretical trends such as digital vitalism, and the hegemony of techno-positivist paradigms which echo the centrality of digital systems of economic optimization and social control. The temporal and spatial scales we are confronting pose new challenges to envision a future. Although computational power now makes visible the climate breakdown it does not make the complex entanglements behind it more thinkable. Rather, computational modeling actually forecloses our ability to grasp the imbrication of technical systems in the collapse of earth systems.

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Projectduration:
March 2016 – March 2021

Financing:
The Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK)

Projectteam:
Projectleader: Antonia Majaca
Projectstaff: Dejan Marković

Project partners:
University of Arts and Design, Karlsruhe (DE)
Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Naples (IT)
Department for Media and Communication, Goldsmiths University of London (GB)