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Angel of History |  Angel of AI

Reflections on Deep Time and Deep Sea

These words echo Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (hereafter WB) and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein: The 1818 Text” (hereafter MS). The numbers of the theses below refer to the corresponding number from Benjamin’s original text, rewritten for the age of AI as a statement against deep sea mining. 

The art, made in conjunction with these words and with the assistance of AI, explores the ways in which AI-created art may actively attract attention to the technology’s potential subservience to industrial extractivism and the exploitation of our planet. For example, a Pasadena-based company called “Impossible Metals” claims to be at the forefront of utilizing AI to harvest minerals from the deep sea “without destroying the habitat,” in contrast to other automated methods of seabed mining. https://impossiblemetals.com/ This is not a substantiated claim. Precious metals such as Nickel and Cobalt mined from the so-called “polymetallic nodules” in the deep sea bed are the latest in the frontier of extraction, considered essential for decarbonized electric grids in the energy transition away from fossil fuel dependence.

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I   The story is told of an automaton constructed with veins, bones, muscles and blood from a burial of corpses in “half-extinguished light” by a man driven by the vision of reanimating life (MS, 45).  Thunderstorms incinerated an old oak tree, inspiring this natural philosopher to learn artificial creation from machines that shuddered into animation with electricity. Like an Arabian “buried with the dead” who escaped oblivion by following glimmers of light, the man gave his exquisite corpse a spark, and thence life (MS, 41). The “deamon” took the man’s name and thirsted to become human, through artifices of knowledge and a simulacra of emotions (MS, several).  

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III & IV   Chroniclers tell the story of the deamon automaton as one of human progress in technology and duplication. Humankind capturing memory visually and aurally, expediting motion, eliminating distance, triumphing over nature’s divisions between day and night, here and there, life and death. A different vision flickers before the “haunted” epistemicists. They tell tales of ways of knowing that are lost, of obliteration, of images and silences gone astray, of immobilities and confinements, of finding paths to survival in dark, dank places. If the artificial epistemicist recounts events in accordance with truths narrated by any chronicler, the haunted knowers live by other paradigms of knowledge and feeling. They are seers who catche a flash of deceptions blurred by time’s forward-moving arrow. Those who see the horrors, struggles, and triumphs of all time and space simultaneously are pulled by the “secret heliotropism of the past” (WB, 255), which draws upon their consciousness as a sunflower bending to its maker. 

VI   Learning to act from the scripts they are fed, the artificial epistemicists speak of sediments, metals, and rocks in the deep sea that will save us from ourselves. In what was once outside the deep time of capital but are now in the crosshairs of the daemon automatons lie sequestered energies. Rocks outside our consciousness for millennia that drift as far away from us as seas in other galaxies. Hidden in them the conformists find human success over a scorched planet. Exulting over the rarity of nodules knotting a precious charge, they hurriedly write a future of victory over the reckless consequences of human industry. They dream of the satisfaction of a depthless hunger for more light, more electricity, more power from dead matter. Yet spaces taken for voids are ecosystems for more life forms than we should know of or fathom, outnumbering us in their brilliant luminosity and dark silences.  Only that epistemicist will “have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins”. (WB, 255) 

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VII   The haunted epistemicist also sees glories. She sees an electric democracy lightening women’s labor, easing time’s tedium, liberating the enslaved, illuminating ignorance, exciting wonder. She sees electric impulses within our brains and in the worldopening wellsprings of ways to learn about the universe and inhabit it with care, community, curiosity, empathy, comfortable ignorance, acceptance. How else would the human armor used in mining provide the first encasing for a marine biologist (Edith Widder) to witness the brilliance of life in deep waters. Yet these lightening-rod narratives of success cannot deflect attention away from the other Gothic mansions we build with the same shining tools of progress. Stinking palaces of grief and destruction, brittle monuments of acidification, soundless continents of species extinction and biodiversity apocalypse. The haunted epistemicist shows chroniclers and their automatons that “there is no document of cilivilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (WB 256). Proof lies in the automaton’s own ontology, which is contingent upon drawing power from the planet and facts from memories inscribed by this world’s chroniclers, false prophets, algorithms, and deep fakes. Never was there as great a need for a haunting by the shadows of the past than today, which is a time as familiar to us as the future imagined by science’s fictions and fiction’s sciences. 

IX & XI  A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” was reimagined by the intelligence of automated art, fed by human imagination. It is no longer an angel blasted into the future with eyes and wings pried open by past storms. The eyes are not askew on the geometrical parabola of a face, riding atop bird claws. This AI angel reaches with a wing tip to touch the surfaces of our spectatorship. As if Leonardo’s Adam stretching to God, or a dying bird rising out of an oil slick. The AI Angel comes from the depths of an aphotic ocean that is blue, absorbing all other colors. Yet the AI gives us smears of rust and blood. Filtered through wispy patterns of a sulcus of the human brain and a delicate lattice crown filigreed by its million points of information down from the world’s databases, AI’s angel too is blown by the storm we call progress. We put in its ear another whisper: To think nature " ‘exists gratis,’ is a complement to the corrupted conception of labor” (WB 259). The expanses of bioluminescent beings whom we do not know and cannot map are not for your mining. These rocks do not exist to redeem us. We curse ourselves to a fate beyond extinction if we do not heed our hauntings. 

A   The capitalists, the technicians, the executives, the social scientists, the data gatherers, the advertisers, the public relations officers, the university researchers, eaters of Enlightenment’s seeds who forget that there is romance, mystery, horror, and wonder in what should remain hidden, must heed now with humility to creatures that live beyond human epistemes. Lit by luciferase, lit to decoy, lit to intimidate, lit to create, lit to obey rules older than ours and outside our capacities to know. These are creatures that are yet within our capacity to destroy in one fragmentary automated second of subsea risers, umbilicals, flowlines, drillers, and dredgers. Learn from your past and leave them be. Of create a future sharded with data and the reap of irredeemable crimes. 

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