Michael Filimowicz

Dr. Michael Filimowicz, AKA DJ Cognitive Hazard, is a University Lecturer in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and a musician and multimedia artist who releases work through his independent record label, Myk Eff Records.

Filimowicz is an interdisciplinary author whose writing moves between academic scholarship, cultural criticism, philosophy, and creative writing. His scholarly work has explored media and communication theory, semiotics and theories of meaning, phenomenology, sound and audiovisual media, human-computer interaction, computational creativity, artificial intelligence, and the social and cultural consequences of algorithms. He is an editor or co-editor of numerous academic books and a series editor for several Routledge book series. His publications have addressed subjects ranging from AI and the future of creative work, privacy, deepfakes, systemic bias and digital totalitarianism to sound design, interactive media, communication, mediation, and creative technologies.

Alongside his academic work, Filimowicz has a longstanding creative-writing practice spanning poetry, short fiction and science fiction, creative nonfiction, experimental prose, and travel writing. His literary work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and his short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize nomination.

His more recent writing brings these academic, philosophical, and creative strands together around questions of power, consciousness, surveillance, psychological operations, and anomalous experience. Since 2023, Filimowicz has documented his experience of being targeted by psychological operations involving American and Canadian government agencies. This experience forms the basis of his six-volume The New Police State series, which examines psychological warfare, digital surveillance, psychological torture, and surveillance as a means of manipulation and social control.

His other books pursue broader philosophical and scientific questions. Xenophenomenology: Thinking About Alien Encounters examines anomalous and nonhuman encounters, while the two-volume Spiralogy: Patterns of Mind, Matter, and Meaning develops an interdisciplinary investigation of consciousness, cognition, meaning, and the relationship between mind and reality. Across these different bodies of work, Filimowicz writes at the intersections of technology, culture, philosophy, creativity, and lived experience.