Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

As part of the Art + Research Center’s Spring 2017 Semester, “New Social Abstractions,” Luciana Parisi, co-director of the Digital Culture Unit at Goldsmiths University of London, will deliver a new public lecture, “Instrumentality or the origin of techno-logic,” at ICA Miami. Seating is limited. For more information on the Art + Research Center at ICA Miami, visit icamiami.org/arc.

Instrumentality or the origin of techno-logic

If the crisis of the Enlightenment project of emancipation has resulted in the eclipse of philosophical thought and the triumph of unreflective Artificial Intelligence, it is no longer sufficient to denounce the neutralising paradox between technoscientific progress and the end of human reasoning. Instead of overcoming this dialectical tension with a negation of instrumental reason, one shall ask whether the crisis of Western philosophy can be read as the historical origination of an artificial reasoning that advances from within instrumentality, means, technical practices. Here the possibility of a techno-logic – or metaphysics of machines – supplants the teleological view of a self-reflexive image of reasoning with a pragmaticist envisioning of a general artificial intelligence.

About Luciana Parisi

Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Theory, Chair of the PhD Programme at the Centre for Cultural Studies, and co-director of the Digital Culture Unit, Goldsmiths University of London. Her research is a philosophical investigation of technology in culture, aesthetics and politics. She has written within the field of Media Philosophy and Computational Design. She is the author of Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (2004, Continuum Press) and Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (2013, MIT Press). She is currently researching the philosophical consequences of logical thinking in machines.