Visiting Experts: Jonathan Beller
Beller’s research “Collateralizing Damage: On the Creation of a New Asset Class (and the Consequences for Revolutionary Strategy)” explores how financial forces shape media ecology, arguing that AI functions as a medium that processes social relations while generating new assets.
Jonathan Beller is professor of humanities and media studies and cofounder of the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of English and of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University; Visiting Professor at REMESO / Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society, Linköping University, Sweden; and Visiting Researcher, University of the Arts, Helsinki Research Institute, Finland.
His books include The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (2006), Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle, and the World-Media System (2006), The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (2017), and The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (2021). He currently serves as co-editor of Social Text for the ST editorial collective.
“[T]he Palestinians’ future as a people is mortgaged to th[e] fear [of the past recurring], which is a disaster for them and for Jews.” (Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, 1979.)
Although the methods differ, both of the images above, Gaza 2024 and Gaza 2035, can be said to be “rendered” by AI. While it is important to understand the computational means by which these and other images come into being, it is equally important to understand the financial parameters at work here. Meanings are on the market and calculation organizes what appears – giving form to matter, putting matter in formations, processing materiality as information.
Beller’s analysis argues that the financial determinants of media ecology are not incidental to the technical procedures by which these and perhaps nearly all images today are manifest: an economic logic operates in and through the dispensation of images and texts themselves as they recursively, which is also to say cybernetically, mediate interventions in material reality and the worlds of the living. AI, it will be argued, is thus best understood as a medium, as a blanket term indicating emergent calculative methods for processing social relations while creating new assets. This medium, operationalized as text, image, number, or matter, logically or neurally, aesthetically or militarily, is simultaneously semiotic and economic – it is economic media.
Jonathan Beller is professor of humanities and media studies and cofounder of the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of English and of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University; Visiting Professor at REMESO / Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society, Linköping University, Sweden; and Visiting Researcher, University of the Arts, Helsinki Research Institute, Finland.
His books include The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (2006), Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle, and the World-Media System (2006), The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (2017), and The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (2021). He currently serves as co-editor of Social Text for the ST editorial collective.
“[T]he Palestinians’ future as a people is mortgaged to th[e] fear [of the past recurring], which is a disaster for them and for Jews.” (Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, 1979.)
Although the methods differ, both of the images above, Gaza 2024 and Gaza 2035, can be said to be “rendered” by AI. While it is important to understand the computational means by which these and other images come into being, it is equally important to understand the financial parameters at work here. Meanings are on the market and calculation organizes what appears – giving form to matter, putting matter in formations, processing materiality as information.
Beller’s analysis argues that the financial determinants of media ecology are not incidental to the technical procedures by which these and perhaps nearly all images today are manifest: an economic logic operates in and through the dispensation of images and texts themselves as they recursively, which is also to say cybernetically, mediate interventions in material reality and the worlds of the living. AI, it will be argued, is thus best understood as a medium, as a blanket term indicating emergent calculative methods for processing social relations while creating new assets. This medium, operationalized as text, image, number, or matter, logically or neurally, aesthetically or militarily, is simultaneously semiotic and economic – it is economic media.