Air Age Blueprint: K Allado-McDowell and collaborators
Thursday, February 2, 2023
Sliding Scale Admission $5-30
Seated program
All ages
This in-person event will also be livestreamed. Your RSVP includes access to the livestream.
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6:30pm: Doors
7:00pm: Paige Emery Performance
7:30pm: K Allado-McDowell Reading/Performance of Air Age Blueprint
8:00pm: Panel Discussion with Erik Davis, Sarah Shin, Jeff Harris, and K Allado-McDowell
K Allado-McDowell's new book Air Age Blueprint follows up from their debut Pharmako-AI, the first book to be co-created with GPT-3. In Air Age Blueprint, a young filmmaker’s life is disrupted by a fated encounter with a Peruvian healer. Embarking on a profound journey, they participate in a human-machine experiment, rooted in magic, that produces a key to rewriting reality – a manifesto describing how entangled human and non-human intelligence will remake our technologies, identities and deepest beliefs.
With performances and rituals by Paige Emery, and Allado-McDowell, and a talk with speakers including Erik Davis, Sarah Shin, and Jeff Harris from OpenAI, Air Age Blueprint explores an animist cybernetics and AI co-creation for the 21st century.
‘Air Age Blueprint inaugurates a new stage in twenty-first century AI writing. K Allado-McDowell’s book has come into being through a collaboration between different forms of intelligence and its story presents a continuation of its own making – a coming together of different forms of existence and thought.’
—Hans Ulrich Obrist
‘Air Age Blueprint elegantly weaves immigrant family histories, native entheogenic cultures, and cybernetic manifestos of social revolution into a collaborative human-machine writing adventure. It certainly opens a portal to a de-anthropocentric narrative of the future. An unquestionable tour-de-force.’
—Chen Qiufan, author of The Waste Tide and AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
‘Air Age Blueprint is a visionary book, a map of cognitive experiments, amplifying possibilities for otherness to manifest, contaminating self and belief, and rewriting transformational roads. Co-writers K Allado-McDowell and their AI companion have hallucinated an animistic techne, a spirit pollinator, a portal for human and non-human to correspond beyond their self-centred worlds.’
—Pierre Huyghe
‘At once futuristic and suspended in time, Air Age Blueprint is a rich meditation, remarkable field manual and work of techno-sorcery for our Aquarian times. Existing in the last gasps of our failing contemporaneity, we are presented with a portrait of a poet and seeker looking into the scrying mirror of an AI companion. Through this journey, we reemerge as readers: transformed, shaky, hallucinating and left wondering – who is the mirror and who is the object? Air Age Blueprint is the magical work I didn’t know I needed to read.’
—Xiaowei Wang, author of Blockchain Chicken Farm
K Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and consultant to cultural, artistic, and technological institutions that seek to align their work with larger traditions of human understanding. Allado-McDowell established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the books Pharmako-AI and Amor Cringe. They are the co-editor, with Ben Vickers, of The Atlas of Anomalous AI. Allado-McDowell records and releases music under the name Qenric.
Paige Emery is an artist exploring the ecological body and the ritual interactions that weave worlds. Her interdisciplinary work bridges poetics and praxis, mysticism and theory, healing rituals and environmental science.
Erik Davis is an author, award-winning journalist, and teacher based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on the intersection of alternative religion, media, and the popular imagination. He is the author, most recently, of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, co-published by MIT Press and Strange Attractor. He also wrote Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010), The
Sarah Shin is a writer, publisher and curator whose work includes making books, texts, gardens, games, scents, spaces, portals and practices. She is a founder of Ignota, a creative publishing house; Silver Press, the feminist publisher; New Suns, a literary festival and curatorial project at the Barbican Centre; and Standard Deviation, a spatial practice exploring the coincidence of psychic, geometric and inhabited space.
Ignota Books is an experiment in the techniques of awakening. Founded in the last days of 2017 in the Peruvian mountains, Ignota publishes at the intersection of technology, myth-making and magic. Deriving our name from Hildegard of Bingen’s mystical Lingua Ignota, we seek to develop a language that makes possible the reimagining and reenchantment of the world around us.
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