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FIONA ALISON DUNCAN
FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary Prize for Bisexual Fiction.

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Interview with Fanny Howe

Interview

Issue No. 29

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

Issue No. 29

Fanny Howe’s bibliography is as bewildering as her itinerant biography. Born in 1940 in Buffalo, New York, the poet and author grew up in...

Interview

January 2020

Interview with Jamieson Webster

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

January 2020

Jamieson Webster serves as a torchbearer for a field out of popular favour. Her practice, psychoanalysis, was last century’s...

Halfway through James Bridle’s foreboding, at times terrifying, but ultimately motivating account of our technological present, he recounts a scene from a magazine article about developments in artificial intelligence The journalist is asking a Google engineer to give an image of the AI system developed at Google The engineer’s response was, ‘I do not generally like trying to visualise thousand-dimensional vectors in three-dimensional space’ A few pages later, discussing the famous example of grandmaster Garry Kasparov losing a series of six chess matches to IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, Bridle quotes Fan Hui, an experienced Go player, describing the Google-developed AlphaGo software’s defeat of professional Korean Go player Lee Sedol at the 2,500-year-old strategy game: ‘“It’s not a human move I’ve never seen a human play this move” And then he added, “So beautiful”’   The first challenge for proving a system’s intelligence is image cognition: AI are trained for facial recognition or to scan satellite imagery Still, technology is not primarily considered a visual problem, even if new technologies’ effect on our lives is the subject of countless movies which are often, to echo Bridle’s title, quite dark Bridle, a visual artist whose artworks consider the intersection of technology and representation, from the shadows cast by drones to the appearance of stock images in public space, does not focus his book on representations of technology, but rather on a different visual problem: invisibility In his introduction, Bridle warns that society is powerless to understand and map the interconnections between the technological systems that it has built What is needed, the artist claims, is an understanding that ‘cannot be limited to the practicalities of how things work: it must be extended to how things came to be, and how they continue to function in the world in ways that are often invisible and interwoven What is required is not understanding, but literacy’   Literacy, in Bridle’s use, is beyond understanding, and is the result of our struggle to conceive — to imagine, or describe — the scale of new technologies A lot of the examples in the book are visual and descriptive, providing new

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary...

Exquisite Mariposa

Fiction

July 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Fiction

July 2019

I broke three contracts in 2016. The first was verbal, a monogamy clause. But he was fucking around too, and I knew, because everybody...

READ NEXT

fiction

January 2014

The Black Lake

Hella S. Haasse

TR. Ina Rilke

fiction

January 2014

Oeroeg was my friend. When I think back on my childhood and adolescence, an image of Oeroeg invariably rises...

Interview

September 2012

Interview with Michael Hansmeyer

Lawrence Lek

Interview

September 2012

Every project made with a computer expresses a relationship between aesthetics and technology. The historical progress of technology works...

poetry

March 2017

Two Poems

Uljana Wolf

TR. Sophie Seita

poetry

March 2017

Mittens   winter came, stretched its frames, wove misty threads into the damp   wood. fogged windows, we didn’t...

 

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