Studios
Antikythera Studios deploy a deeply interdisciplinary speculative design methodology that uses scenarios to surface counterintuitive concepts and develop key research themes through propositions that move technological speculation beyond simplistic utopian and dystopian agendas. This approach recognizes that technologies are never simply good nor bad, but rather mechanisms that reveal things about the world and reposition the agents, environments, protocols, materials and infrastructures that compose and organize it.
Why is a studio approach essential? Architecture — as both a discourse & discipline — has evolved a studio culture in which speculative and experimental modes of research are given a degree of autonomy from direct professional application, allowing it to explore ideas and literacies by working through projective models. Today, the software and hardware infrastructures of planetary computation need the same kind of speculative studio culture: one that focuses on foundational questions of what computational systems are and could be, examines what is necessary and what isn’t, and maps scenarios to test and chart trajectories accordingly.
The studio approach is guided by a set of key principles:
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Diagnostic before Projective
Research-driven to catch up to the present
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Pragmatic to the point of being Speculative
Informed by counterintuitive, uncanny functionalism
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Scenario-Driven rather than Solutionist
Active Critical variables rather than linear shining paths
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Radical in the literal sense of going to the root
Cognitive simulations over symbolic performances
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Pharmakon Propositions
Neither utopias nor dystopias
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Composite CONSTITUENCIES
Creates rather than caters to specific audiences
A New Philosophy Of Planetary Computation
2022
Benjamin H. Bratton
Introducing Antikythera, a new program to examine the implications of an unfolding radical philosophical event: the emergence of planetary-scale computation.
Antikythera Studios operate on a two-year cycle, spanning Design-Research & Design-Development phases:
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In the first year, an intensive exploratory 12-to-20 week Design-Research Studio surfaces key questions and concepts around the program’s research areas, culminating in projects and concepts that lay groundwork for additional focused development.
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In the second year, several 4-week Design-Development Studios focus on select scenarios and propositions to further deepen specific ideas and areas of inquiry. Outcomes take form in essays, films, prototypes, and multimedia outputs that contribute to a philosophy of technology in modes fit for the 21st century.
During both phases, Studio Researchers and Affiliate Researchers from diverse professional backgrounds – from architecture to astrobiology, interaction design to economics, sci-fi literature to computer science, history of science to simulation design – are invited to bring expertise to collaborative design briefs, seminars, and workshops to develop projects that contribute to Antiktyera’s growing body of work across its research themes.
Past studios
2023 studio projects
Whole Earth Codec
2023
Connor Cook, Christina Lu & Dalena Tran
How may emergent cognitive infrastructures constitute the basis of planetary intelligence? If the sensing layer focuses on ecological data over personal data, how does the diversity of multi-modal inputs and outputs constitute the basis of a computational syntax, and does the recursivity of large models constitute a model for planetary self-observation?
HAIID
2023
Daniel Barcay, William Morgan & Sarah Olimpia Scott
How has HCI shifted from clicking menus to the design of synthetic personalities, what does this portend for how we imagine AI in anthropomorphic terms, and what interpersonal neuroses are sure to become part of everyday interaction with computational systems?
Vivarium
2023
Will Freudenheim, Christina Lu & Dalena Tran
If embodiment is intrinsic to intelligence, natural or artificial, then how do simulations mediate between virtual and physical interactions? How might toy world simulations allow for not only new forms of training in both bounded domain and open world scenarios, but also new forms of collaborative interactions between different human and computational agents?
Xenoplex
2023
Connor Cook & Darren Zhu
Given the uncertain boundaries of “life” what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for its emergence, can these be artificialized, how does their artificialization enable astrobiological inquiry and what if the whole experiment system is alive?
The Ends of Science
2023
Will Freudenheim, Imran Sekalala & Darren Zhu
What is the impact on machine intelligence on science, what happens when we discover things that are scientifically true but incomprehensible, what kind of test organism is a large model and what methods of mechanistic interpretation may allow for new forms of synthetic theory?
Autocatallaxy
2023
Will Freudenheim, William Morgan & Darren Zhu
If markets are information processors, then as economies become more complex how does the complexity of the information calculated and expressed as price evolve, and how does the emergence of AI shift the visibility of information and the automation of production /distribution dynamics?
Planetary Counter-Simulation
2023
Daniel Barcay, Sara Drake, Sarah Olimpia Scott & Imran Sekalala
What happens after the Chinese balloon episode? As planetary computation becomes extraplanetary through sensors, satellites and stations beyond the Karman Line, in what ways does the geopolitics of Earth observation systems track the long-term competitive evolution of simulation and counter-simulation?
Cloud Megaregionalization
2023
Sara Drake, Noya Kohavi, Sarah Olimpia Scott & Julian Siravo
What is the impact of the stack on regional planning and development? How are the geopolitics of chip manufacturing, land and resource allocation and the political geographies of border economics related to the broader hemisphericalization of digital infrastructures?
Cognitive Infrastructures
Synthetic Intelligence
Design-Development Studio
June 21st – July 19th 2024
Cognitive Infrastructures is the theme for the 2024 Synthetic Intelligence Design-Development Studio in London.
As AI becomes both more general and more foundational, it shouldn’t be seen as a disembodied virtual brain. It is a real, material force. AI is embedded into the active, decision making systems of real world systems. As AI becomes infrastructural, infrastructures become intelligent.
Individual users will not only interact with big models, but multiple combinations of models will interact with groups of people in overlapping combinations. Perhaps the most critical and unfamiliar interactions will unfold between different AIs without human interference. Cognitive Infrastructures are forming, framing, and evolving a new ecology of planetary intelligence.
What kind of design space is this? What does it afford, enable, produce, and delimit? When AIs are simultaneously platforms, applications and users, what are the interfaces between society and its intelligent simulations? How can we understand AI Alignment not as just AI bending to society, but how societies evolve in relationship to AI? What kinds of Cognitive Infrastructures might be revealed and composed?
2024 Design-Development Studio, London
Antikythera’s Design Development Studio Cognitive Infrastructures will run from June 21st to July 19th 2024.
The studio will select 12-18 interdisciplinary, full time Studio Researchers–including engineers, designers, scientists, philosophers, writers and technologists–to develop speculative prototypes and propositions in response to briefs investigating the socialization of machine intelligences at planetary scale. The studio will be based at Central Saint Martins in Kings Cross, with special events including lectures, gatherings, and salons unfolding across London and environs. The Design-Development Studio will combine both collaborative software engineering driven by technical constraints with first-principles speculative and philosophical explorations of counterintuitive provocations and challenges in society-AI interaction.
Researchers will work with a network of Affiliate Researchers, including collaborators from Google Research/ Deepmind, Cambridge Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Cambridge Centre for Existential Risk, and many others. Special seminars, lectures and workshops will be hosted by BENJAMIN BRATTON, Director of Antikythera, BLAISE AGUERA Y ARCAS, VP Technology and Society, Google Research/ Deep Mind, THOMAS MOYNIHAN, Historian, CHEN QIUFAN, Science-fiction author, SARA WALKER, Astrophysicist and co-developer of Assembly Theory, and others.
Core Principles: Design & Philosophy for Speculative Synthetic Intelligence
Rather than applying philosophy to ideas about technology, Antikythera derives and develops philosophy from direct encounters with technology. Rather than approach Artificial Intelligence as the imitation of the human, Synthetic Intelligence starts with the emerging potential of machine intelligences.
Antikythera approaches the issues of Synthetic Intelligence though several core principles:
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Computation is not just calculation, but the basis of a new global infrastructure of planetary computation remaking politics, economics, culture and science in its image.
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The ongoing emergence of AI represents a fundamental evolution of that global infrastructure, from stacks based on procedural programming architectures, to ones based on training, serving and interacting with large models: from The Stack to AI Stack.
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Machine intelligence is less a discrete artificial brain than the pervasive animation of distributed information sensing and processing infrastructures.
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”Antikythera” refers to computation as both an instrumental technology–a technology that allows us to do new things, as well as an existential technology–a technology that discloses and reveals underlying conditions.
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As existing technologies have outpaced legacy theory, philosophy is not something to be applied to or projected upon technology, but something to be generated from direct, exploratory encounters with technology.
What are Cognitive Infrastructures?
The studio’s core hypothesis is that as artificial intelligence becomes infrastructural, and as societal infrastructures concurrently become more cognitive, the relation between AI theory and practice needs realignment. Across scales – from world-datafication and data visualization to users and UI, and back again – many of the most interesting problems in AI design are still embryonic.
Natural Intelligence emerges at environmental scale and in the interactions of multiple agents. It is located not only in brains but in active landscapes. Similarly, artificial intelligence is not contained within single artificial minds but extends throughout the networks of planetary computation: it is baked into industrial processes; it generates images and text; it coordinates circulation in cities; it senses, models and acts in the wild.
This represents an infrastructuralization of AI, but also a ‘making cognitive’ of both new and legacy infrastructures. These are capable of responding to us, to the world and to each other in ways we recognize as embedded and networked cognition.
AI is physicalized, from user interfaces on the surface of handheld devices to deep below the built environment. As we interact with the world, we retrain model weights, making actions newly reflexive in knowing that performing an action is also a way of representing it within a model. To play with the model is to remake the model, increasingly in real time.
How might this frame human-AI interaction design? What happens when the production and curation of data is for increasingly generalized, multimodal and foundational, models? How might the collective intelligence of generative AI make the world not only queryable, but re-composable in new ways? How will simulations collapse the distances between the virtual and the real? How will human societies align toward the insights and affordances of artificial intelligence, rather than AI bending to human constructs? Ultimately, how will the inclusion of a fuller range of planetary information, beyond traces of individual human users, expand what counts as intelligence?
Studio Development Briefs
Antikythera’s Cognitive Infrastructures studio will unfold from several interrelated speculative briefs for intellectual and practical exploration:
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CIVILIZATIONAL OVERHANG AND PRODUCTIVE DISALIGNMENT
AI overhang affects not only narrow domains, but also arguably, civilizations, and how they understand and register their own organization–past, present, and future. As a macroscopic goal, simple “alignment” of AI to existing human values is inadequate and even dangerous. The history of technology suggests that the positive impacts of AI will not arise through its subordination to or mimicry of human desires. Productive disalignment–bending society toward fundamental insights of AI– is just as essential.
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HAIID: HUMAN-AI INTERACTION DESIGN
HAIID is an emerging field, one that contemplates the evolution of Human-Computer Interaction in a world where AI can process complex psychosocial phenomena. Anthropomorphization of AI often leads to weird "folk ontologies" of what AI is and what it wants. Drawing on perspectives from a global span of cultures, mapping the odd and outlier cases of HAIID gives designers a wider view of possible interaction models.
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TOY WORLD POLICIES
Toy Worlds allow AIs to navigate and manipulate low-dimensional virtual spaces as analogues for higher dimensional real world spaces, each space standing in for the other in sequence. In doing so, AIs learning means the adjustment of policies that focus and adapt their learned expertises. The sim-to-real gap can be rethought in two ways: recovering loss between low and high dimensions, and the agnostic transfer of policy from one domain to another.
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EMBEDDINGS VISUALIZATION
The predictive intelligence of LLMs is based on the adjacencies of word embeddings in mind-altering, complex vector spaces. Different ways of visualizing embeddings are different ways of comprehending machine intelligence. Descriptive and generative models for this can be drawn from neural network and brain visualization, complex systems modeling, agent interaction mapping, semantic trees, and more.
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GENERATIVE AI AND MASSIVELY-DISTRIBUTED PROMPTING
For generative AI, the distances between training data and prompt engineering can seem, at different times, to be vast or tiny. To train or to prompt are both forms of interaction with large models. As the collective intelligence of culture is transformed into weights, weights are activated by prompts shared across domains to produce new artifacts. Though interface culture tends to individuate interactions with models, there are many ways to design massively-distributed prompting, producing collective artifacts that mirror the societal-scale intelligence of training data.
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MULTIMODAL LLM INTERFACES
The design space of interaction with multimodal LLMs is not limited to individual or group chat interfaces, but can include a diverse range of media inputs that can be combined to produce a diverse range of hybrid outputs. Redefining “language” as that which can be tokenized breaks down not only genre and media but multiplies and integrates forms of sensing (sight, sound, speech, text, movement, etc.) New interfaces may allow users both comprehension and composition of those hybrids.
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DATA PROVENANCE AND PROVIDENCE: THE GOOD, THE POISONED, AND THE COLLAPSED
The future utility of LLMs as cognitive infrastructures may be undermined by model collapse caused by retraining on outputs, and model degradation caused by training on poisoned data. Like the Ouroborous, the model eats its own tail. Meanwhile, differentiation between human-generated and model-generated data and artifacts will become more difficult and complex. High quality domain-specific data is largely private and/or privatized and so not generally available for socially-useful models. Will synthetic data and techniques like federated learning become more essential in ensuring data quality, and if so what are the necessary systems?
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THE PLANETARY ACROSS HUMAN AND INHUMAN LANGUAGES
The planetary computation we have today is not planetary enough. The tokenization of collective intelligence is limited by how the most important LLMs are trained largely on English, and on English produced by a relatively small slice of humans, which themselves are a small slice of information producing and consuming forms of life. Given the role of planetary AI for ecological sensing, monitoring and governance –not to mention fundamental science– the prospect of “organizing all the world’s information” takes on renewed urgency and complexity.
Applications
The interdisciplinary studio will combine philosophy design and code and so applications are encouraged from applicants with diverse expertises. These can include computer science, AI, philosophy, interaction design, architecture, systems design, economics, linguistics, history of science and technology, digital media, filmmaking and more.
Those interested in applying to the Cognitive Infrastructures Design-Development Studio in London should submit a CV, a PDF of Work Samples, a 1-minute candid Video Introduction, and an Application Form.
Applications are open until March 1st 2024. Selected applicants will be interviewed and notified of their participation in the studio by March 18th. The studio will be held full time, in-person at Central Saint Martins — University of the Arts London. The studio will begin with an orientation the evening of Friday June 21st, and then run full time from June 24th to July 19th 2024. Studio Researchers will receive a stipend of 4000 GBP for the duration of the 4-week studio, and should ensure they have the right to work in the UK. For any additional or related inquiries, contact us.
Work produced in Antikythera’s Design-Research and Design-Development Studios is not proprietary nor exclusive property of Antikythera. As a non-profit think tank, the goal is the active dissemination of ideas so that they may realize their fullest influence. Studio participants are invited to further develop ideas and projects incubated within the Studio, as Antikythera may continue projects and prototypes with or independent of original collaborators. All IP is shared and open for further development.
Application Timeline
Application REQUIREMENTS
① 1-2 page CV
② 10-page PDF of Work Samples
③ 1-minute Introduction Video
④ Application Form
The Studio will be held in-person in London. Participants receive a stipend and must have the right to work in the UK.
