“We will become vastly smarter as we merge with our technology,” says Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering. “Let there be a digital future, but let it be a human future first,” counters Shoshana Zuboff, author of Surveillance Capitalism, an analysis of “the scandalous abuse of digital capabilities” in our information civilization. Today’s philosophical assessments of the role of technology are torn between such extremes. The same is true of the worlds of art and architecture, inhabited as they are by techno-optimism as well as extreme scepticism. At a moment when we can no longer imagine a world without technology, it is vital to ask how we—the human inhabitants of this planet—imagine the world and its technologies?

Are Friends Electric? is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Moderna Museet within the context of its exhibition Mud Muses: A Rant about Technology.

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8 essays
LeeAnn Suen and Florian Idenburg
To be wary, to beware, or to be aware: there are choices to be made by the architect in handling the algorithm. Semantic hairsplitting might be someth...
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Jia Zhang, Dare Brawley, and Laura Kurgan
Networks and Society Whether it is online or in our daily physical routines, we interact with others—close friends, acquaintances, familiar and unf...
Adam Greenfield
Trust is good, control is better. —Vladimir Lenin For an outsider, particularly one without any Mandarin to lean on, thinking clearly about th...
Discourses about the possible alliance of art and technology have informed institutional projects across the history of modern art and contributed to ...
Brian House, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Jia Zhang, Dare Brawley, and Laura Kurgan
The word “homophily” was coined in a highly-cited 1954 essay by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton on friendship in a mixed-race housing project ...
Koo Jeong A and Sven-Olov Wallenstein
Daniel Birnbaum Koo Jeong A’s augmented reality artwork density (2019) hovers in the air in a hidden garden in Regent’s Park, London. Nobody can see i...
Mud is another element. One comes to love it, to be like a wading bird, happy only at the edges of the world where land and water meet, where there ...
Nikolaus Hirsch, Daniel Birnbaum, and Nick Axel
Are Friends Electric? is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Moderna Museet within the context of its exhibition Mud Muses: A Ra...
Category
Technology, Posthumanism
Subject
Artificial intelligence, Optics & Perception, Algorithms

Are Friends Electric? is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Moderna Museet within the context of its exhibition Mud Muses: A Rant about Technology.

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