[Air-L] Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence: online event, 12 Sept

[Joanna Zylinska]

 Dear All,

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce details of an upcoming online
symposium based around a discussion of Gary Hall's new book, *Masked Media:
What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence
<http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/> *(London:
Open Humanities Press, 2025; open access).

Friday 12th of September, 2025
9:30 – 11:30 am Mexico City
11.30-13.30 Ann Arbour
16.30-18.30 London
via Zoom

With:
Peter Baker (University of Stirling)
Alexandra Anikina (University of Southampton)
Gareth Williams (University of Michigan)
Benjamín Mayer-Foulkes (17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos)
Gabriela Méndez-Cota (Culture Machine/Universidad Iberoamericana)

Co-organised by the electronic journal Culture Machine
<https://culturemachine.net/> and 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos
<https://diecisiete.org/masked-media/> in Mexico City, the event is hosted
by the Laboratory of Contemporary Writings / Laboratorio de Escrituras
Contemporáneas, which is being launched with this event. The idea for the
Laboratory of Contemporary Writings emerged from a recent ACLA Seminar
titled ‘Displacing Academic Practices in the Ruins of the Neoliberal
University’. While linked to conversations around infrapolitics
<https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/>, its focus
is broader: on writing, subjectivity, students, ourselves, and on how to
respond to the conditions we’re living through today.

To join this event online, email: enlace at 17edu.org

---

On Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial
Creative Intelligence
<http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/> [open
access]

If we want a more socially and environmentally just future, do we need a
radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory? It’s this
question that Gary Hall and his collaborators have been addressing for over
twenty years with experimental publishing projects such as Open Humanities
Press, Liquid and Living Books, Radical Open Access Collective, and the
Culture-led Re-Commoning of Cities. Unsettling received ideas of the author
and book, originality and copyright, real and artificial intelligence,
these uncommon communities of theorist-mediums have been testing some of
the ‘non-modernist-liberal’ modes of creating and sharing knowledge that
are enabled by various media technologies, from writing and print through
photography and video to computers and GenAI. By thinking outside the
masked black box that renders the anthropocentric, Euro-Western
knowledge-making practices of the arts and humanities invisible – ensuring
the human is kept ontologically separate from the nonhuman, be it animals,
the planet or algorithmic machines – they show there’s no such thing as the
human, the nonhuman already being in(the)human.

*Masked Media *is one such experimental project. It is not a
'human-authored' work. Instead, the thinking within it has been generated
by a radically relational inhuman assemblage that includes AI and more.
Although the book appears under a real name –  ‘Gary Hall’ – which, like
Banksy and Karen Eliot, acts as a mask, it is not the intellectual property
of a singular human individual, and is published under a Collective
Conditions for Re-Use licence to reflect this. Masked Media demonstrates
how such norm-critical experimentation is of vital importance to our
understanding of everything from identity politics and the decolonisation
of knowledge, through epistemologies of the Global South and the
possibilities of open city infrastructure, to extractive capitalism,
planetary destruction and the Anthropocene.

--

Joanna Zylinska

Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice

Director (Interim) of the Centre for Attention Studies
<https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/centre-attention-studies>

King's College London

Department of Digital Humanities



NEW BOOK: The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the
Eye and A <https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546836/the-perception-machine/>I
(MIT Press, open access)



Website <http://www.joannazylinska.net/>

IG research notebook <https://www.instagram.com/joanna.zylinska/>