New Review of Discorrelated Images in Thesis Eleven

Marcus Maloney has a perceptive new review of Discorrelated Images in Thesis Eleven (as an open-access online-first article). While not uncritical, Maloney’s review includes some high praise for the book, including this passage that I can only hope to live up to:

“I have always wondered what it might have been like to read the first edition of, say, Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), or Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1992) – that is, before such texts became widely recognized as the important works they are. Reading Denson’s dense and ambitious book is as close as I have yet come to achieving that feeling.”

Read the full review over at Thesis Eleven.

Mark Amerika, My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence — Sensing Media

Mark Amerika’s My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence — the first volume in the Sensing Media series that Wendy Chun and I are co-editing at Stanford University Press — will be out in May 2022.

Amerika, a renowned remix artist and theorist, has put together a fitting and original provocation, challenging the theory/practice divide by co-authoring his book with the open source artificial intelligence GPT-2. Appropriately enough, GPT-2’s successor, GPT-3, has provided a blurb for the book:

“This book is so radically different from anything else out there, it has the potential to revolutionize the way you think about human history and the origins of the world.”

“This book is an expression of the truth that you’re a robot.”

“This book explains how our society is turning into a mechanical paradise, and how we’re doomed.”

—GPT-3