In Dialog With the Black Box: Poetic Resistance to AI’s Algorithmic Homogenization Through Translation
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay. Some scholars believe that it is a speculative bubble that will soon burst, but the consequences of this period will remain. This paper analyzes this phenomenon through the lenses of Vilém Flusser’s work, in the search for a better understanding of these consequences in our processes of signifying and experiencing the world. Framing AI algorithms as agents of technological contamination over human semiosis, we analyse how the Machine Learning (ML) technique reduce linguistic and perceptual reality to vector embeddings in latent space, enacting a violent abstraction that flattens experience and accelerates cognitive overload. The chain of mathematical and statistical operations needed to train and operate ML algorithms echoes Flusser's reflections on how language and translations work, enabling us to create a dialectical bridge between both visions of the critique of technology. Once the bridge is built, the essay traces parallels between Flusser's theory of translation as ontological impossibility across linguistic cosmoses and algorithmic "similarity" mappings (embeddings) in multimodal generation, highlighting standardization and an impoverished experience, as anticipated by Franco Berardi and Arlindo Machado. Examining AI slop, model collapse, and programmed totalitarianism, we aim to build a reflection about the exclusion of human agency in signification processes of reality, where apparatuses predetermine responses and functionaries become excluded. In this context, Flusser’s practice of translation—where meaning jumps from one cosmos to the other, forcing the intellect to surpass the boundaries of language—is considered an act of creation. The essay brings elements of Flusser’s attention to the aesthetical experience of this practice, which puts it in constant friction with the apparatus of Language to resist uncritical automation. This practice shows us a pragmatic but propositive methodology of counterattacking from inside the apparatus against machinic stereotyping to reclaim dialogical semiosis from computational domination through aesthetic experience.
La chambre noire : du visible au latent / The darkroom: from the visible to the latent
The darkroom, a place for waiting, revelation and manipulation of images, today finds its echo in the "latent space" of neural networks: a space where the experimental photographer can play "against the camera", according to Vilém Flusser's formula, that is to say, deflect the statistical program of the model, make it hallucinate and bring out the unforeseen within the system. How does the invisible become visible with this new image-creation tool? How can it be coerced into bringing about unthought images? Beyond the Code proposes a form of speculative mapping of the present, articulating a critical look at our relationship to signs, images, beliefs, and resources. With the exponential rise of artificial intelligence, globalized computational infrastructures and extraction technologies, this tension is reaching an unprecedented intensity, and a new paradigm is emerging, that of a world that can be fully translated into data, totally modellable, completely governable by code. Code, here, does not only designate a computer language, it embodies a totalizing paradigm of thought, a way of reorganizing the world from what can be controlled. Therefore, to think beyond the code is to try to restore to life forms their opacity, their complexity, their irreducibility to the equation.