This is our upcoming volume for Bloomsbury Theory, edited by Antonia Majaca. It will be a new book in the Theory in the New Humanities series edited by Rosi Braidotti. 

It examines the relationship of the "Anthropos" to technology and nature, as computation overhauls both of these on a planetary scale. If naming the new geological era "Anthropocene" implies that the Earth has been rendered artificial by the human impact, then what is needed is a focus on how the capitalist engineering of this "artificial Earth" has accelerated in recent decades in parallel with the expansion of digital technological systems. This includes so-called "artificial intelligence," itself a technology of extraction — from the earth's minerals to the labor of low-wage information workers. This publishing project explores how unexpected forms of collective intelligence emerge against the backdrop of the epistemic regime of data positivism, algorithmic classification and prediction, and takes as its starting point a call to rethink the specificity of and relations between notions such as intelligence, technology, planetarity, and general intellect while considering what unique cognitive and political capacities we might need in order to grapple with the link between the breakdown of earth systems and the proliferation of systems of planetary computation. The book consists of twenty-three essays, both artistic and academic.

The book will be published in December 2024 in both open access and print versions. The print version can be pre-ordered here.

This publication emerges from Antonia Majaca's artistic research project “The Incomputable—Art in the Age of Algorithms,” instigated at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Graz University of Technology, and funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, and the Styrian Provincial Government Department of Economy, Tourism, Science and Research.

To call the new geological era ‘Anthropocene’ is to imply that the Earth has been rendered artificial by the impact of humans. The capitalist engineering of this ‘artificial earth’ has accelerated over the last couple of decades, in parallel with the expansion of digital technological systems, such as ‘artificial intelligence.’ The Incomputable examines the relation of the human or the ‘anthropos’ to both technology and nature in terms of instrumentality and extraction. The departure point for the research project, as well as the programme of events and a publication, is a call for a radical break with this all-pervading logic, a call that requires, in the first instance, a critical engagement with the patriarchal genderings of both technology and nature. Thinking through these two intertwined demands and the two historical processes of artificialization forces us to revisit the old dilemma: if nothing precedes techne and labor, i.e. if it is true that where there is labor there is artificiality, then what is not artificial? Here there is a need for a different epistemic ordering of general intellect beyond the master narratives of originary technicity and the metabolic relation between man and techne that they posit. In positing the need to think ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘artificial earth’ in parallel, The Incomputable is searching for a mode of intelligence as ‘difference without separability’, as theorized by Denise Ferreira Da Silva. It is a project based on detechnologizing nature and denaturalizing technology. Whilst holding in mind the complex entanglements between earth systems breakdown and the proliferation of computational systems, the forthcoming series of discursive events, and a publication develops through a broad network of transdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary exchanges. We think alongside a number of artists, scholars, thinkers and doers critically engaging with the contemporary conditions of our data-driven culture where computation, technology and life on earth have become inextricable. Rather than taking issue with artificial intelligence as such, or with climate breakdown as such, we initiate a set of distinct critical takes on the normalized, techno-solutionist concept of planetarity where planet is posited as an abstract totality that can be computationally captured and where the techno-sphere becomes the 'new nomos'. Some of the questions that the project orbits around are thus: what is contained within and what is foreclosed by the notion of planetarity as it emerges in techno-solutionist ideologies? How are relations of production, exclusion, and exploitation obscured by the image of the technologically contained (Earth) totality? What would be a materialist, situated, and incomputable planetarity – one that takes into account actual subjectivities, political economy and the violent subjugation processes such alienated planetarity cannot show us? What kinds of intelligences are needed to address the extractivist relation to both nature and technology and the far-right realisms on their horizons? How do we practice degrowth while recognizing the relevance of both carbon and silicon intelligences and of both neural and non-neural cognition? How does, for example, the visual nominalism of Google Earth influence the image of the ‘total outside’? While focusing on these concerns we wish to remain attentive to the simple fact that, as Spivak says: ‘The globe is on our computers. No one lives there.’

This website is a growing repository of the elements informing the research process on The Incomputable: current thoughts (incomputable), interlocutions (community), activities (flow), a sporadically growing collection of online readings (radar), operative pool of terms (glossary) and a drifting selection of aural and visual interventions (curriculum).