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In collaboration with
Shuang Frost
Vincent Garton
Bogna Konior
Gabriele de Seta 
Xin Wang
Dino Zhang

In this website, Zheng Mahler have used the AI newsreader Qiu Hao released by the Chinese Xinhua State News Agency in 2019 as a mouthpiece to voice contemporary, less monolithic, more subversive, subcultural responses to AI and technology in China. Collecting excerpts of essays by leading scholars of technology and artificial intelligence in the East, ‘The Master Algorithm: Redux’ is a kind of digitally embodied, scholarly volume spoken through the AI newsreader.

WEBSITE INSTRUCTIONS
-Navigate to videos via menu on the right (just scroll on mobile)
-Select full-screen for titles to disappear
-Press logo on bottom left to return to splash page
-Audio is best experienced in headphones
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Anchor 0

00. A PRELUDE TO SHITFUTURISM
Dino Zhang

01. THE AESTHETICS AND LOGIC OF WANGHONG
Dino Zhang

Anchor 1

02. MACHINE ENVY
Xin Wang

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03. WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A (VIRTUAL) BAT?
Zheng Mahler

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04. ‘TRANSLATING CHINESE AI: FROM “HUMAN-MADE INTELLIGENCE” TO “BLACK TECH”
Shuang Frost

Anchor 4

05. AUTOMATICITY AND THE MYSTERY OF STATE
Vincent Garton

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Anchor 6

06. APAIC REPORT ON THE HOLOCODE CRISIS

Gabriele de Seta

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07. BUBALUS BUBALIS
14HZ-40,000HZ
Zheng Mahler

Anchor 8

08. THE DARK FOREST THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE
Bogna Konior

Anchor 9
Zheng Mahler Logo Blur PNG.png

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Credits

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Animation by
Zheng Mahler Studio

Sound by John Bartley
zhengmahler.world
Zheng Mahler are Hong Kong based artist Royce Ng and anthrozoologist Daisy Bisenieks’s collaborative examination of global trade, the relational networks connecting nature and technology and more-than-human geographies, exploring their flows of mutual influence and the environmental architectures they produce. Utilising digital media, performance and installation they develop  speculative scenarios and immersive, sensory encounters that explore the limits and potentials of their respective disciplines. Together they have exhibited, performed and participated in numerous art spaces, institutions and residencies, working alongside various communities in Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe and the US.

The Master Algorithm: Redux 

Zheng Mahler

 

In collaboration with Shuang Frost, Vincent Garton, Bogna Konior, Gabriele de Seta, Xin Wang, Dino Zhang

 

‘The Master Algorithm: Redux’ is a revisiting of Hong Kong based artist duo Zheng Mahler’s 2019 work, which used the figure of an AI newsreader Qiu Hao released by Chinese State news agency Xinhua in 2018 as an avatar to voice a series of speculative scenarios about the cultural, economic and political implications of AI development in China. While the original work took the presence of Pedro Domingo’s book the ‘The Master Algorithm’ spotted on the desk of the Chinese premiere in 2019 as a starting point, it offered a series of science-fiction vignettes on the utopian possibilities of AI in China, exploring narratives beyond the well worn tropes of surveillance and big data which dominate techno-orientalist narratives around Chinese technology in Western media. Revisiting this work in 2023 after the pandemic and the acceleration of the technocratic state it triggered, Zheng Mahler have used the avatar as a mouthpiece to voice contemporary, less monolithic, more subversive, subcultural responses to AI in China. Collecting excerpts of essays by leading scholars of technology and artificial intelligence in the East, ‘The Master Algorithm: Redux’ is a kind of digitally embodied, scholarly volume spoken through the AI newsreader. Contributions include digital ethnographer Dino Zhang’s take on the aesthetics of online and offline wanghong culture, sociologist Gabriele De Seta’s science-fiction theory-fiction on the implications of holographic encryption technologies, art historian Xin Wang’s documentation of humans impersonating online ‘bots’ of long dead scholars on the Chinese internet, ethnographer Shuang Frost’s delving into the etymology of the translation of the term ‘artificial intelligence’ in Chinese, political theorist Vincent Garton’s exploration of alternative models for the relation between the state and AI based on ancient Chinese thought and media theorist Bogna Konior’s ‘dark forest theory of intelligence’ inspired by the eponymous science-fiction novel by Liu Cixin, exploring ideas of deceit and silence in AI and extraterrestrial intelligence. Interweaving between these narratives, the avatar will also surreptitiously insert references to Zheng Mahler’s own works; sonic water buffalo and conscious VR bats inhabiting the same futuristic, discursive space as the other speculations. The website created by Zheng Mahler features a 3D animated version of the AI avatar Qiu Hao who presents the various texts as news items, which the user can scroll through to explore these various perspectives, genealogies and speculations on the social impact of technology in China. 

 

Contributions by Shuang Frost, Vincent Garton, Bogna Konior, and Xin Wang are excerpted from their texts ‘Translating Chinese AI: From “Human-Made Intelligence” To “Black Tech”’, ‘Automaticity and the Mystery of State’, ‘The Dark Forest Theory of Intelligence’, and ‘Machine Envy’, in:

 

Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence. Benjamin Bratton, Bogna Konior, and Anna Greenspan (eds) Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2023. 

https://www.urbanomic.com/book/machine-decision-is-not-final/

 

All rights reserved to Urbanomic and the authors.

 

Dino Zhang’s contribution is excerpted from:

 

Zhang, Ge. 2024. ‘Aesthetics and Logic of Wanghong in Postdigital China’, in Jian Xu, Glen Donnar and Divya Garg eds, Asian celebrity and Digital Media, Hong Kong University Press.

 

All other writings by Dino Zhang taken from the blog:

https://anthropos.live/blogroll/

 

Gabriele de Seta’s contribution is excerpted from: 

 

De Seta, Gabriele. 2021. APAIC Report on the Holocode Crisis. Surveillance & Society 19(4):474–479

 

All rights reserved to the authors.

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'The Master Algorithm: Redux' was commissioned by Nadim Samman for the digital platform of the exhibition, conference and book project 'Poetics of Encryption' at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin, Germany, October 2023. 

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https://poeticsofencryption.kw-berlin.de/src/html/DigitalCommissions.html

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