iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The Machine Agencies lab at Concordia University where I work as a coordinator is hosting a hybrid guest lecture with Dr. Alexander Campolo on the 22nd. Zoom registration at the link! milieux.concordia.ca/event/alignm...

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 03/10/2026

Imagine embracing the humanism of someone with such religiously-determined conservative values just to get a dig in

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 03/10/2026

This deserves to be seen over here

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Conversation
addie wagenknecht
@wheresaddie
This… “stuff”?
Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You… open your laptop, and you write… I don’t know, a tweet, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to understand algothrims but what you don’t know is that that algorithm is not just a sort, it’s not a filter, it’s not a heuristic, it’s actually a carefully tuned ranking model. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, a research lab published a collection of collaborative filtering papers, and then I think it was Google, wasn’t it?… who shipped the large-scale ranking systems. And then those techniques quickly showed up in the stacks of eight different companies. Then it filtered down through the cloud providers and then trickled on down into some tragic side project where you, no doubt, fished it out of some GitHub issue. However, that algorithm represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the industry when, in fact, you’re running an algorithm that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”
Quote
Pope Leo XIV
@Pontifex
·
Oct 2
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 02/10/2026

Can any other Criterion Channel subscribers tell me if the website is being weird? It keeps saying it could not renew my sub because of an error with my payment error, but I'm not blocked from streaming anything. Also, all the images for movie links are replaced with a black Criterion logo.

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 01/10/2026

Blocked but want to make this point Who cares their intent as long as they're open. The notion of having this amorphous pool of reference that can be traversed with algorithms is itself alone too profound to give up as a development. I'd rather have that Babelesque resource more than anything else

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 01/10/2026

Seems like the Cornell 7 has precipitated new metoo style reckoning. Here's lifedrive___/Alice Aster on Instagram sharing receipts of NYC art world / theory people being heinous in a groupchat (with presumably more receipts to come) www.instagram.com/p/Dd9RCWpEep...

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 30/09/2026

it's so odd for a weird fiction author to be so sentimentally attached to the "human" and the "minds of others" as preconditions for how to define writing. Especially when he's the source of one of the best metaphors for latent space! (The "shimmer" / Area X)

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 30/09/2026

Dear lord what is wrong with you

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 26/09/2026

Fuck this video for real. It just ignores the actual real people adopting these aesthetics as a form of critique. It allows corporations to have a monopoly on the absurd or "dada-esque" without any possibility of recuperation. Pessimistic bullshit. www.instagram.com/reel/DdXf9NV...

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 22/09/2026

It's finally chilly out!

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 22/09/2026

This is where the answers come from

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 21/09/2026

The First Nations Technology Council hosted a First Nations approaches to AI webinar last month and you can watch it for free online. They're also launching an AI research initiative focused on Indigenous Data Sovereignty firstnationstech.ca/news/launchi...

These questions are why our AI resources on the Learning Platform are centred around Indigenous Data Sovereignty.

Concerns about what happens to Indigenous data and knowledge when AI systems are used came through consistently in our engagement, and they were reinforced by what we heard from Danielle, Chelsea and webinar participants.

Questions about where information goes, who controls it, how it might be reused, what rights communities have over that information, and how data governance frameworks can be applied in practice cannot be separated from conversations about AI adoption.

Our Learning Platform is designed to help people explore these questions while also building their understanding of AI and how it can be used.

Resources are centred around:

Getting started with a foundational understanding of what AI is, what it can do, how it works and the systems behind it.
What Indigenous Data Sovereignty means in the age of AI and introducing frameworks for Indigenous data governance.
Community stories of practical uses of AI and Indigenous-led innovation and showing how Indigenous people, organizations and businesses are engaging with these technologies to support their own work, communities and goals.
Practical guides designed to help people and organizations apply what they have learned to real decisions, including evaluating AI tools, developing privacy policies, creating AI disclosure statements and acceptable-use policies, and using prompts more effectively.

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 21/09/2026

This is a very fascinating observation from a person who was instrumental in popularizing Italian Brainrot! A decentralized hyperstitional creation with no singular origin medium.com/@fabianmosel...

When people started pretending that a bunch of random AI images were an IP, they inadvertently caused these character to break out and become a global entertainment success story, without being tied to any company. The participatory creation of media brought manufacturers to produce merch and toys in a decentralized way, videogame makers to create the most popular Roblox games, and anyone who wanted to use them, was able to, because no own owns them.

And now, one year later, the ouroboros has completed. On April 21st 2026, OpenAI’s 5th iteration of DALLE, commonly known as ChatGPT Images 2.0, tokenized, categorized and trained on Italian Brainrot, resulting in the first image model that can generate Italian Brainrot on its own.

There’s something very poetic in these AI-native characters that did not have any context at all, no origin except whatever DALLE 3 knew about the world, to now be the global phenomena it has become, therefore being ingested through the training dataset and allowing us to regurgitate it again forever through the latest OpenAI’s image model. The tokenization of token-native characters. Internet folklore.

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 21/09/2026

Nathalie Olah’s work was revelatory to me on this point. You internalize ways of acting, behaving, being inconsistent with the social mores of classes above your background and it sabotages opportunities

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 18/09/2026

This reminds me of the banana discourse started by, I think, the leftist Malcolm Harris, about how consumers would have less access to products such as bananas in a socialist future and we should be okay with that

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 16/09/2026

Thank you for this opportunity, Mmega

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 15/09/2026

Paperclip maximizer but all the paperclips are Clippy

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 15/09/2026

51 degrees and 84% humidity is fucking insane

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 13/09/2026

Fuck Oliver Grau and fuck Lev Manovich too apparently? Congrats to Forensic Architecture for winning the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica

oliver.grau2018 Ars Electronica's decision to award this year's Golden Nica to
FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE sparked such controversy that no Austrian official was willing to present the jury prize. The artists claimed to be documenting and spatially analyzing the massive attacks, destruction, and displacements in the Gaza Strip in a scientifically objective manner. Yet, inexplicably, they completely disregard the gigantic tunnel system beneath the buildings—arguably the largest
underground terrorist stronghold in human history—in whose passages hundreds of abducted hostages were tortured, raped, and murdered, and whose liberation was, after all, the primary objective of the subsequent (but excessive) military operation. They also completely ignore the initial massacre targeting the festival of the LGBTQ community—a group Hamas loathes with deadly hatred-all in order to label their work (which is thus one-sided and unscientific) "genocide," an accusation that was ultimately dismissed as untenable even by the prosecution at the International Court of Justice. I have appreciated Forensic Architecture's work in the past.

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oliver.grau2018 Ars Electronica's decision to award this year's Golden Nica to
FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE sparked such
Comments
levmanovich 2h
Thank you for your post. I am with you 100%. I realized Ars Electronica politics a few years ago when I was on one of the jury. The jury for another category decided to award their first prize to a Russian art group.
By this time the group had immigrated (like so many other Russian artists and intellectuals did after 2022) and they were living in Europe. But at the dinner Ars CEO told us that he will veto this decision, because it will raise questions in Austria.. )))
Reply

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 13/09/2026

This ad + the comments is one of the most cursed things to ever come across my Instagram feed

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 10/09/2026

Alex Quicho writer and scholar known for her theories about being a girl online ("Everyone is a Girl Online" archive.ph/6pSrj) posted this in her stories on Instagram the other day. Do not know the source but really the perfect encapsulation of youth culture today.

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 10/09/2026

it's a pretty big conference so probably no video, sadly, and nothing available online yet, but yes, the goal would be to publish something soon! I'm bogged down with comprehensive exams right now sadly. Here is the abstract I submitted, however

Now is the Time of (Generative) Monsters

Since its introduction generative artificial intelligence (GAI) has been vexed by critiques over its tendency to produce inaccurate or inscrutable content. In its early days superfluous or misshapen hands challenged confidence in its creative potential. Though the technology has since improved these so-called hallucinations precipitated a practice of experimentation antithetical to aesthetic convention. Output has also been shown to produce deformed, monstrous bodies in excess of morphological reality regardless of original intent. The monster as symbol of transgression and excess is uniquely situated to assess the generative production of what amount to assemblages of diffuse data from otherwise disparate sources.

Transgressive art practice in this respect exploits what is considered a failure of the technology to reveal radical imaginaries often ignored in innovation narratives. Artists such as Erin Robinson, Jess Tucker, and Arvida Byström have leveraged generative AI to explore the transformation of the body and the evolution of desire through mediation and technological development. Drawing on the scholarship of, among others, Patricia McCormack, Jack Halberstam, and Leif Weatherby, it will explore the monster as a conceptual framework for the analysis of GAI-produced media. The maelstrom of latent space becomes a laboratory to conjure new forms of identity and desire.

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 10/09/2026

One of my favorite recent works that utilizes AI workflows, fickleporno by Jess Tucker / Fetter is going to be displayed on the massive advertising screens in Time Square at the end of September (among many other works). Click the link for video applications.artinnovationgallery.com?artist=Z9lX0XV

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 10/09/2026

Very insightful interview with @aarthivadde.bsky.social about her new book We the Platform! Especially loved this excerpt since I have been trying to make a similar point. Critiques of AI can't ignore these decades-old aesthetic innovations! lareviewofbooks.org/article/we-t...

I think the task now for arts and humanities folks is to separate out political and legal advocacy for labor protections and fair training practices from reactionary theoretical and aesthetic stances. As you know from the perspective of an artist, some of the most important fiction, poetry, and artwork of the last century troubled the categories of “intention,” “originality,” and “expression.” These words resurface regularly now in—deliberately?—naive rejections of AI slop.

I hate slop as much as the next person, but I’d like to believe that we can balance the strategic simplifications that come with resistance to Big Tech with a more nuanced evaluation of art that openly and critically incorporates computational methods—small language models, and even large ones—into its composition.

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 09/09/2026

This article touches on a lot. Importantly, I think, it distinguishes the act of training as free use while still highlighting the importance of transparency about how "datasets are being created." This is also an interesting point, but I think trade-offs exist for its creative potential too!

Matthew Kirschenbaum, a Commonwealth Professor of Artificial Intelligence and English at the University of Virginia, warned of what will happen if the “great virtue of the book”—its existence as a self-contained object, with a human writer, and a human history—is dissolved into data that siphons all context from the original. The boundaries of the book (e.g., its covers and materiality, publication information, and author) disappear when the text is “homogenized” and “loses all of its relationships that were present in the original book.” Thus, the very thing protecting A.I. from copyright infringement—its ability to rephrase things—is also the problem: L.L.M.s transform literature into some hybridized, half-dead thing that is far removed, if not completely untethered, from its original source. It creates a product so drastically new that the text as an individual work is effectively destroyed. This less obvious form of erasure is much more hazardous and worrisome than destructive scanning.

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 09/09/2026

"What kind of Canadian are you?"

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 06/09/2026

That Wordle is going viral on here and I have not solved it yet concerns me because I am currently stumped lol

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 04/09/2026

What not reading cyberfeminism does to mf www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Fu...

Like woman, software systems are used as man's tools, his media and his weapons;
all are developed in the interests of man, but all are poised to betray him. The
spectacles are stirring, there is something happening behind the mirrors, the
commodities are learning how to speak and think. Women's liberation is sustained
and vitalized by the proliferation and globalization of software technologies, all of
which feed into self-organizing, self-arousing systems and enter the scene on her sid

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 04/09/2026

Here have a book and learn something :)

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 04/09/2026

It got me lol mydialect.us/quiz-standar...

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 03/09/2026

This is art. From the group show "Marilyn Monroe. I feel like I know her, but sometimes my arms bend back" on view at the Krupa Art Foundation in Wrocław, Poland

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 03/09/2026

"Robinson repeatedly processes women through deepfake likeness to create a grotesque amalgamation that — even when viewed from every possible angle — never transforms into an anatomically normal body" contemporarylynx.co.uk/speaking-tru...

Similarly, media artist Erin Robinson’s lenticular print Rubenesque depicts body multiplication. Reimagining Peter Paul Rubens’s painting The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, Robinson repeatedly processes women through deepfake likeness to create a grotesque amalgamation that — even when viewed from every possible angle — never transforms into an anatomically normal body. Reflecting on these concepts in the artists’ works, the exhibition’s catalog states that: “Nudity no longer signifies the exposure of the ‘real’ body; instead, it becomes another layer of representation — a construction of persona and a costume that, in keeping with the logic of glitch feminism, unsettles binary divisions and blurs the boundaries between human and non-human, natural and artificial.”

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 01/09/2026

"There is a recurring masculinist posture in critical theory that adopts the language of combat, resistance, intervention and victory, while actually retaining a very weak efficacy beyond its own intellectual constituency."

JZ: There is a recurring masculinist posture in critical theory that adopts the language of combat, resistance, intervention and victory, while actually retaining a very weak efficacy beyond its own intellectual constituency. With the idea of “loser images,” I was trying to challenge the heroism that often accompanies theoretical responses to a crisis, whether we are talking about visual representation or political representation. I drew on Ewa Majewska’s concept of the “avant-garde of the weak,” as well as on Hito Steyerl’s “poor image,” to ask what a less heroic politics of images might look like. The “loser image” does not try to outcompete dominant visual regimes on their own terms. It embraces low resolution, obsolescence, recycling, copying, degradation and misuse as ways of resisting both upgrade culture and the extractive logic that demands ever more powerful machines, ever cleaner images and ever more optimised humans. This is where I locate its potential as a form of “ethical piracy”: not piracy as libertarian appropriation, but as a tactical redistribution of images and technologies outside their prescribed circuits of value.

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GAI Debord @dylanschenker.com · 01/09/2026

Man, I love Joanne Zylinska diffractionscollective.com/2026/08/22/3...

JZ: The “void” I am pointing to is not a nihilistic emptiness so much as the possibility that there is no sovereign core of the human from which thought and creativity emanate: no soul, pure interiority or stable essence that guarantees our uniqueness. The anxiety provoked by generative AI perhaps comes partly from seeing aspects of our own thinking externalised. In that sense AI provides another challenge to human self-understanding. But recognising a statistical dimension to thought does not mean accepting a crude cognitive reductionism in which creativity is nothing but probabilistic recombination. Here I am thinking with Vilém Flusser. We always operate from within apparatuses – technical, social, cultural, ideological – but we are not simply determined by them. The human is also an information processor capable of becoming, in Flusser’s terminology, an in-former: someone who gives form to information, plays with the apparatus and sometimes breaks or redirects its circuits.

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