Thursday, March 30, 6:30 – 8:30 pm Eastern Time

On March 30, 6:30pm in the New Museum Theater, Rhizome will host the book launch for two new books, The Institute for Other Intelligences by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, and Air Age Blueprint by K Allado-McDowell, moderated by Elvia Wilke. The event will feature performative readings followed by a moderated talk and Q&A with the authors. Get your tickets here.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), consciousness, and human subjectivity will be explored in two new books launching at an event hosted by the Museum’s digital art affiliate Rhizome, featuring performative readings and a panel discussion moderated by writer Elvia Wilk.

In The Institute for Other Intelligences (X Artists’ Books, 2022, eds. Ana Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram, design by Becca Lofchie, illustrations by Fernando Diaz), author Mashinka Firunts Hakopian fuses speculative fiction and media studies into an imagined future where machine intelligences gather annually, to discuss the inherent vices of their human-made code. Hakopian presents a series of speculative exchanges and documents from these imagined meetings to critically consider current approaches to nonhuman intelligence.

Weaving together fiction, memoir, theory, and travelogue, K Allado-McDowell’s Air Age Blueprint (Ignota Press, 2023, cover art by Somnath Bhatt), was written with an AI writing partner, GPT-3, and human editorial input. A young filmmaker’s life is disrupted by a fated encounter with a Peruvian healer. Their travels lead them to meet K—a double agent working between art and technology—who invites them to test a secret program called Shaman.AI. Their human-machine experiment, rooted in magic, produces a key to rewriting reality—one in which entangled human and nonhuman intelligence will remake our technologies, identities, and deepest beliefs.

Books will be available for purchase at the event. The Institute for Other Intelligences is also available for order through xartistsbooks.com here.