The Atlas of Anomalous AI

What do the divinatory practices of Ancient Greece’s Oracle of Delphi, the Incan knotted quipu counting device, the I Ching, the nine billion names of God and Elizabethan mathematician John Dee have to do with artificial intelligence? The Atlas of Anomalous AI is a compelling and surprising map of our complex relationship to intelligence, from ancient to emerging systems of knowledge. A wildly associative constellation of ideas, stories, artworks and historical materials, the Atlas draws on art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas ― an image map of the “afterlife of antiquity” ― to approach the defining concepts of AI from an imaginative, artistic and revitalising perspective. The Atlas presents a hyperdimensional view of the world, through a broad range of perspectives that explore the question of what AI has been and what it is becoming. Key texts on modelling, prediction and automation are brought together with stories of science fiction, dreams and human knowledge, set among visionary and surreal images by Emma Kunz, Pablo Amaringo, Carl Jung, Hilma af Klint, William Blake.The Atlas expands our common understanding of AI and raises new questions beyond a illusory fixation on linear progression, towards a new horizon of infinite play in the construction of artificial intelligence today.

Ben Vickers is a curator, writer, explorer, publisher, technologist and luddite. He is CTO at the Serpentine Galleries in London, co-founder of Ignota Books and an initiator of the open-source monastic order unMonastery.

Kenric McDowell leads the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google Research, facilitating collaboration between Google AI researchers, artists, and cultural institutions. In addition to twenty years experience in software design and engineering, Kenric has an MFA in photography and regularly performs acoustic and electronic music.