Mashinka Firunts Hakopian interviewed by Nora N. Khan in LA Review of Books
On Other Intelligences:
A Conversation with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
IN APRIL, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian met me at my home in Los Angeles, where we discussed her remarkable new book, The Institute for Other Intelligences (2022). In The Institute, a host of algorithmic agents that we have known, now live with, and will know participate in an academic symposium, convened in an undefined timeline. Over the sessions, they collectively analyze their past. The agents are from many eras of artificial intelligence: from early chatbots to the future children of current machine learning systems, from critical artists’ neural networks to a host of speculative nonhuman intelligences. They reflect on their histories and design, and toast to moments of hopeful resistance and critique and organizing, in which they evolved or were recalibrated.
Reading The Institute, I was struck by just how many scales of time a book can hold: the conference’s future time, digital time, algorithmic time. I am pitched forward and back across time in much the same way algorithmic and predictive systems train us to think forward to an uncertain horizon. The algorithms of today often freeze us as “marks” of our past, to hold us captive and bound into the future. Hakopian uses complex time travel to map the many possible outcomes of technological decisions wrought now, today. We are asked: How do algorithms’ ways of knowing shape our own? What possibilities in our lives become curtailed or expanded by thinking through the decisions of evolving algorithmic agents? How might algorithmic agents and humans negotiate between all of their fully inhabited, embodied worldviews, and move toward co-engineering radical outcomes?///
NORA KHAN: What kind of technological future is unfolding in The Institute for Other Intelligences?
MASHINKA FIRUNTS HAKOPIAN: I was deliberately coy in sketching out the contours of what this future might look like. The convening in the book unfolds in an indeterminate timeline to underline how unthinkable our present might look from its vantage. How far into the future would we have to project ourselves in order for our present, in its palpable bleakness, to become unthinkable?
NK: Fictive algorithmic agents, interviewed in the book, speak on their past purposes, which seem (gloriously) quaint in this future. They exercise a collective memorializing of our present’s algorithms, and the ones most likely coming. This insistence on multiplicity struck me as a strategic refusal, of a future made through one vision alone. You ask us to imagine a critical culture that would make Institute’s gathering possible.
MFH: Sidestepping any one particular vision, I wanted to invoke what decolonial studies frames as “pluriversal epistemologies of the future.” In the performative lectures that accompany the book, there’s a slide that visualizes the Institute as a planetary network of sites set in pastoral environs, in buildings made of bioorganic matter, adorned with SWANA geometric patterns and carpet motifs. The book’s fictive director mentions that this Institute is one among a large network of related agencies, which includes institutes for plant intelligences, stones, and other nonhuman beings.