Bogna Konior is Assistant Professor of Media Theory at the Interactive Media Arts Department at NYU Shanghai, where she also co-directs the AI & Culture Research Center. She is a mentor in the Synthetic Minds Lab at the Medialab Matadero and an affiliate researcher at Antikythera. Her work on philosophy, history, and future of digital culture and technology has been presented internationally. Read an interview about her current projects at Chaosmotics. Selected texts are here or can be requested by email. Full CV here.
Current #1
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This project proposes a media theory informed by the intellectual history of eastern Europe, specifically in dialogue with the non-fiction writings of Polish doctor, philosopher and science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem. Through a life of alienation, occupation and forced displacement, it argues, Lem was able to predict civilizational trajectories that would in time implicate the whole of human species, while outlining a singular vision of technology that is not reducible to inter-human relations, but rather alters the co-evolution of organic and inorganic existence. I propose a philosophy of contemporary technologies as existential pursuits in dialogue with his insights and the history of eastern Europe as such.
Read ‘The Gnostic Machine: AI in Lem’s ‘Summa Technologiae.’
Read ‘Exonet’
Current #2
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Drawing on my own education at Marcelina Darowska’s Catholic school for girls established in 1857, this multimedia research project engages female Christian erotic mysticism, from the Middle Ages until modernity, as an early philosophy of the internet. Through theology and cyberculture theory, it celebrates the ‘unnatural,’ reclaiming theologians and mystics as prophetesses of the internet to come. Through this lens, contemporary examples like chatbot partner apps, virtual reality sex, and xenowombs, become spaces of human-machine malleability and intimacy.
Read Determination from the Outside: Stigmata, Teledildonics and Remote Cybersex
Watch Angels in Latent Spaces: Notes on AI Erotics
Watch The Female Robot
Current #3
Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of AI
This edited collection spans philosophy, social science, history, science-fiction and art criticism at the cross-roads of two questions: What is a decision? What is a machine? And can the rich material and intellectual history of China’s engagement with these questions provide insight into trajectories of artificial intelligence unveiling itself across the planet?
Book forthcoming from Urbanomic.
Excerpts featured in a Zheng Mahler solo show here.
Current #4
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
An experiment with radical cosmic determinism, this forthcoming book theorizes the internet, artificial intelligence, social media, computation, and ultimately the trajectory of the human species through the lens of Liu Cixin’s dark forest theory. Working from the intellectual history of the ‘eastern’ side of the Cold War, it proposes a new theory of communication, intelligence and agency, rooted in espionage and doublespeak. If deception is the measure of intelligence, what would truly intelligent computers be like? And how could humans navigate relations with them?
Original essay (2019)
Dark Forest Theory of AI keynote (video)