Beyond Classification: The Machinic Sublime (BCMC) emulated an academic roundtable discussion with the authors and 3 machinic/more-than-human guests. Part performance, part intervention within the context of an academic conference, BCMC introduces a novel and explicitly visible strategy of co-dependency for an array of diverse intelligences through a connected loop of human, machine, and animal agencies. In its practical development, BCMC involves each member’s cultivation of a hybrid machine-biological agent – Violet: the Machinic Interlocutor, a synthesis of viola voicing, AI and a human performer; Artificial Imagination, a GPT-3 and CLIP/BigGAN text and image system; and Euglena, a fine tuned GPT-2 text engine controlled by a live dish of the freshwater alga Euglena gracilis. During the performance, the 6 members (3 human, 3 non-human) BCMC panel moved as a group through a guiding framework of five original sub-themes: “On Plants as Potential”; “On Our Relationships with Machines”; “On Care”; “On Extraction”; “On Beauty, Aesthetics, and the Sublime”. For each of these sections, we composed short narrative vignettes as commencing provocations for the discussion.

The meteoric rise of AI in the last years can be seen as a part of a larger tendency towards deeper, more opaque data collection and analysis techniques that form the dense substratum beneath the proliferation of human-computer interfaces today. As a human developer, the most striking qualities of generative AI are its vastness, non-determinism, and infinitude— explicit themes and qualities of a machinic ‘sublime’. How can a human artist/programmer sensibly navigate this multi-dimensional space of latent meaning? Successful approaches to these new sets of tools and new sets of realities will require learning new habits and techniques for navigating such plastic, high-dimensional spaces, while still pursuing singular expression, voice, and intent. We have been working on a system with multiple levels of hybridity with computer, musical instrumentation and microbial motion/metaboly, and engaging in discussions about more-than-human ‘artistic’ and ‘creative’ intelligences. Despite increasing fears and dystopian visions of a Technological Singularity, we see this project as a resistance to an oversimplification of intelligence as analogues of (lesser) human minds, and seek to recapture the essence of humanity as an embodied and relational agent set within flattened and more mutually dependent ecologies of information exchange.