Atlas of Anomalous AI

What do the divinatory practices of Ancient Greece’s Oracle of Delphi, the Incan knotted quipu counting device, the I Ching, the nine billion names of God and Elizabethan mathematician John Dee have to do with artificial intelligence?

The Atlas of Anomalous AI is a compelling and surprising map of our complex relationship to intelligence, from ancient to emerging systems of knowledge. A wildly associative constellation of ideas, stories, artworks and historical materials, the Atlas draws on art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas — an image map of the “afterlife of antiquity” — to approach the defining concepts of AI from an imaginative, artistic and revitalising perspective.

The Atlas presents a hyperdimensional view of the world, through a broad range of perspectives that explore the question of what AI has been and what it is becoming. Key texts on modelling, prediction and automation are brought together with stories of science fiction, dreams and human knowledge, set among visionary and surreal images by Emma Kunz, Pablo Amaringo, Carl Jung, Hilma af Klint, William Blake.The Atlas expands our common understanding of AI and raises new questions beyond a illusory fixation on linear progression, towards a new horizon of infinite play in the construction of artificial intelligence today.

**Edited by Ben Vickers & K Allado-McDowell
Foreword by Bill Sherman
**

Like a snake eating its tail, artificial intelligence exists in a circular relationship with its human creators.

The Atlas of Anomalous AI is a compelling and surprising map of our complex relationship to intelligence, from ancient to emerging systems of knowledge. A wildly associative constellation of ideas, stories, artworks and historical materials, the Atlas draws on art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas — an image map of the “afterlife of antiquity” — to approach the defining concepts of AI from an imaginative, artistic and revitalising perspective.

The Atlas presents a hyperdimensional view of the world, through a broad range of perspectives that explore the question of what AI has been and what it is becoming. Key texts on modelling, prediction and automation are brought together with stories of science fiction, dreams and human knowledge, set among visionary and surreal images

Contributions from writers, philosophers and curators including: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Ramon Amaro, Noelani Arista, Benjamin H. Bratton, Federico Campagna, Arthur C. Clarke, Rana Dasgupta, GPT-2, GPT-3, Yuk Hui, Nora N. Khan, Suzanne Kite, Jason Edward Lewis, Catherine Malabou, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matteo Pasquinelli, Archer Pechawis, Noah Raford, Nisha Ramayya, Beth Singler and Hito Steyerl.

Artworks by: Anni Albers, Pablo Amaringo, Refik Anadol, William Blake, Ian Cheng, Ithell Colquhoun, DeepDream, Federico Díaz, Susan Hiller, Hildegard of Bingen, Pierre Huyghe, C. G. Jung, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, Paul Laffoley, Lucy Siyao Liu, Branko Petrović and Nikola Bojić, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Casey Reas, Jenna Sutela and Suzanne Treister.

Editors:
Ben Vickers is a curator, writer, publisher, technologist and luddite. He is CTO at the Serpentine Galleries in London, co-founder of Ignota Books and an initiator of the open-source monastic order unMonastery.

K Allado-McDowell works in the overlap between music, language, technology and healing. With over twenty years of experience translating between technical and cultural worlds, Allado-McDowell is a sought after speaker and consultant to cultural, artistic, and technological institutions that desire to align their work with larger traditions of human understanding. Allado-McDowell established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI, bringing artists and philosophers into collaboration with machine learning researchers to develop research strategy and policy for emerging AI technology. Allado-McDowell records and releases music under the name Qenric.Like a snake eating its tail, artificial intelligence exists in a circular relationship with its human creators.

The Atlas presents a hyperdimensional view of the world, through a broad range of perspectives that explore the question of what AI has been and what it is becoming.