even though the interest and questions around general intelligence, and computational neorationality, act to fracture and question how we understand thinking, sensing and being; it is always worth staying grounded in contemporary political event and practise.

i am fascinated with the philosophical advances made by the new materialists, realists and object oriented scholars, but i want to synthesise this with what i see as a distinctly MATERIAL obsession with political contradiction and conflict in the contemporary world. how the spatio-political modes of conflict can be forensically examined, and in the case of ai examine the way conflict manifests itself through the modes of thinking and knowledge production created by specific, 'narrow' forms of contemporary ai.

particularly in the realm of ai, there is an old obsession with the labs of mit, humanlike robots and academic circles of intelligent computational research. this sometimes loses sight of the way in which contemporary ai is specific in its action, intention, interest and politic.

from the ai which decide on advertising or personal consumption preferences (spotify, facebook, twitter et al.) to those which remotely control and decide upon targets in military conflicts - this new digital landscape is not concerned with a specific anthro-mimesis. they are concerned with narrow corporate and state interests [...] exacting instruction in a way that is so effective and effecient is induces visceral and fearful responses.

when we talk about forensics we talk about how technoscience can help us unravel and understand the materiality of crime and conflict. in what way can this NEW materiality be synthesised with the new materialists of philosophy and theory

"
Of all the object-oriented practices, forensics is simultaneously the
grimmest and the one with the highest comic potential. After all, it is a mode by
which the present theater of horrors is performed by objects for a public. Things
do not speak by themselves, they have to be asked. Comic moments—a man asking
things of a skull and expecting it to speak back, say—obviously also exist within the
greatest of tragedies. Forensic experts often used figures of speech that animated
the inorganic, made claims with and posed questions to objects large and small,
ventriloquize not only skulls and ruins but physical and digital objects:
forests, software, territories, technical networks, and glaciers
"
- Eyal Weizman, Questions on Materialisms