ATEK-639/439 — Fall 2025

Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0

Scott Benzel
Mondays 1-3:50 A211H

“Whatever else AI is, it is not neutral, and neither can we be. AI is political because it acts in the world in ways that affect the distribution of power, and its political tendencies are revealed in the ways that it sets up boundaries and separations. The apparatus of AI forms feedback loops with the rest of society: it’s “a structured structure that becomes a structuring structure” (Bourdieu, 1980)”
Dan McQuillan, Resisting AI, an Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence

“…rituals of reversal…“rewire” the crucial connections in the social structure by providing symbolic statements of traditional social imperatives and basic categories of…world view.”
Evon Z. Vogt, Rituals of Reversal as a Means of Rewiring Social Structure

This course examines whether artists employing machine learning, generative algorithms, predictive models, and other technics—tools of what Deleuze called “the Societies of Control”—can make art that is evocative, powerful, critical, perhaps even socially transformative.

Introductory Readings

Tiqqun, The Cybernetic HypothesisDan McQuillan, from Resisting AI, an Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence

Syllabus