AI – Invisible Mirrors

July 12, 2023

AI/Midjourney Presentation

Below is the documentation of a presentation I gave at the ‘Challenges and Opportunities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Creative Educators’ event, the Art House, University of Worcester June 7th 2023, organised by my colleague Desdemona McCannon.

My talk has the rather formal title ‘Using Midjourney to Explore Relations Between Word and Image with Level 4 Fine Art Students’. Before I get to that, I take a detour through some of my PKD-related work.

June 28, 2021

Fiction Machines III (Online Event)

The third Fiction Machines event, organised by The Centre for Media Research at Bath Spa University, will take place this Thursday, July 1st, between 6 and 9 pm. The event is free and you can book your place here.

I will be presenting a proposal for a posthumous novel by Philip K. Dick written by an Artificial Intelligence.

Other speakers at the event will be Ami Clarke, Tony D. Sampson, Maud Craigie, Andy Weir, Distributed Cognition Cooperative (Anna Engelhardt, Sasha Shestakova), Richard Carter, Mikey Georgeson, Ada Hao, Harry Meadows and Charlie Tweed.

“Finally an authoritative book on that weird, complex figure of the zombie that delves deep into the dark heart of the matter rather than skating the surface. John Cussans is that rare writer who can bring to bear anthropology, cultural studies, colonial and post-colonial history, philosophy, politics, folk-lore and a love of pulp fiction and film to offer a compelling story about how a marginal superstition from the Caribbean became the defining monster of our times. Prepare for a wild ride that moves elegantly from Hegel and Haiti, via Mesmerism, James Bond, Georges Bataille and Surrealism to Papa Doc Duvalier and Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors, always steadily illuminating a path through a forest of delirious details. A truly marvellous journey.”

Roger Luckhurst, author of Zombies: A Cultural History

“Cussans rejects exceptionalist explanations of Vodou and the zombie to present a nuanced description of those phenomena within the international political, economic and cultural environment in which both the realities and the inventions are situated. This comprehensive work is a must read for anyone wishing to understand more about the destinies of African-based religions in the Americas, and especially concerning the uses and abuses of Haitian cultural phenomena by outside interests.”

LeGrace Benson, author of Arts and Religions of Haiti: How the Sun Illuminates Under Cover of Darkness and President of The Haitian Studies Association.

“No one alive, or – almost certainly – deceased, has thought about zombies more voraciously than John Cussans. While the outcome of this feasting is not pretty, what it has unearthed cannot be laid to rest again. Those who doubt the consistency, deep historical momentum, or global significance of the ‘zombie-complex’ will find all such reservations fundamentally challenged by this troubling book. Subsequent to this meticulous and wide-ranging process of exhumation, it is no longer plausible to deny that an inexterminable anticipation of undead uprising continues to define the horizon of our world.”

Nick Land, author of Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism.