We're on Ghost Now
A periodic reminder that my Substack is dormant
Hello! If you’re getting this message, you are following Cybernetic Forests on Substack. However, I haven’t been writing on Substack in over a year. If you’d like to follow Cybernetic Forests, you can find it — and subscribe, for free! — on my own website: https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/
If you have no idea why you signed up for this list or why you are getting this message, here are some of the things I’ve been publishing:
Human ______
A series of posts examining the reasons humans do things we do, and why AI probably won’t stop us. The series includes:
Human Literacy: We keep hearing about “AI literacy.” But are we sure we know how to be human?
Human Conversation: What do we get out of a conversation with people that we cannot get from a conversation with a machine?
What is Machine Text?
Taking inspiration from the humanities and philosophy of language, I try to think through what exactly machine text is: why does it make sense, and what separates the way it makes meaning from the way humans make meaning? First I examine imagination, then I examine the role of the social:
“A LLM can’t participate in language for the same reason a dog can go to church,
but a dog cannot be Catholic.”
Noisy Human Tour Talks & Seminars
The full text of remarks and seminars offered up around Europe this summer, focusing mostly on the relationship between AI, art, and noise from a critical perspective. Here’s a few!
Remarks on AI, Noise, and Creative Misuse for the Artificial Intelligence & Contemporary Creation conference, 24 May 2025 at the Jeu de Paume, Paris.
Remarks from an in-person debate, ‘L’IA en question, questions à l’IA’, a two-day event at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, on May 24/25. The event focused on debates about the role of AI in contemporary society.
What is Generative AI for Design? Remarks to the Re Shape AI Forum, held in Hochschule für Gestaltung in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany in May 2025, and post-conference reflections.
Is AI Art Net Art? (No). Remarks from a panel with Vladan Joler, Valentina Tanni & I from 26 June 2025 at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, on parasitic resistance and creative misuse across net art and AI.
Signal to Noise at NCM, Melbourne
The Signal to Noise Exhibition at the National Communications Museum in Melbourne, which I co-curated with Joel Stern and Emily Siddons, which examined the role artists played as “noise in the system” of technology, with an eye toward the history of technology, art, and resistance. I sent out a walk-through of the exhibition and some of my curatorial notes.
If that sounds like something you signed up for but haven’t quite seen, you probably signed up for substack but not for the actual mailing list! Hop on over and push a “subscribe” button over here:
Thank you!