Stay ConnectedWhat does it mean to be human in an age where experience and behavior are mediated and regulated by algorithms? The Disintegrator Podcast is a limited series exploring how Artificial Intelligence affects who we are and how we express ourselves.
Join Roberto Alonso Trillo and Marek Poliks, as they speak to the artists, philosophers, scientists, and social theorists at the forefront of human-AI relations.
Copyright: © Copyright Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso
Preorder Exocapitalism, support the pod!
via Becoming Press
via Metalabel
Two titanic figures in contemporary theory join us for two separate and strongly divergent episodes on the status of revolutionary thought in political philosophy today.
Ray Brassier influenced a generation of philosophers not only with his outstanding and highly rigorous writing, but also his absolutely stunning translations of Quentin Meillassoux and François Laruelle, and in so doing is subcutaneously responsible for literally a decade of earthquakes in the discourse. Ray joins us to evaluate the status of Marx in the 21st century.
Ray traces the long arc from Nihil Unbound through Marx, Sellars, and the inferentialist tradition, opening up an unapologetically rationalist framework for understanding both science and emancipation, without reducing either to liberal platitudes or metaphysical fantasies.
We discuss the seductive dangers of naive anti-humanism, the legacy of German idealism, the automation of reason, and why political theory today needs to be deeply embedded in materialist accounts of scale, finance, and abstraction. Ray shares a trenchant critique of both the empiricist and idealist strands of Enlightenment thought, offering instead a dialectical, normatively grounded, socially embedded concept of rationality that returns to Kant and Hegel by way of Wilfrid Sellars.
We strongly recommend:
We’re on with Morgane Billuart, a writer and artist and a researcher whose work engages critically with technologically mediated and determined worlds — not least within her exceptional book “Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed: Inquiries in Female Health Technologies.” Morgane joins us to talk about a large, recent research project on a particular character that many of us identifies with, what Geert Lovink calls the “critical internet researcher” — a figure who engages in a kind of postdisciplinary media theory while at the same time producing and publishing their work through the very media they are studying, the Online.
We strongly recommend:
Gordon White is a chaos magician, shamanic practitioner, and permaculture designer based in Tasmania. He podcasts and teaches through the vehicle of Rune Soup, the world's largest magic academy, and he writes prolifically -- not only on the Rune Soup blog but in several incredible books. Gordon's breadth and depth of knowledge is unbelievably humbling, and it was an honor to spend an hour or so with him.
We came to Gordon for perspective, to some bring context and breadth and dimension to our relatively narrow world. Disintegrator sits in a kind of para-academic space, where we tend to limit the things we allow ourselves to write and think in terms of what's acceptable in mainstream academia. And there are so many people in this space, squashed between the outer walls of the academy and a totally vast, teeming ocean of different ways of thinking and being.
((An academic might chastize us for using 'outside' as a kind of euphemism for an alien or an other, but we'd push back -- it is the inside that we're all kind of bunched up against, like feudal serfs huddling for protection and warmth. As we look outside, we've started to speculate about what might be out there, inventing our own 'pseudosacreds' that preoccupy our minds without forcing us to change anything about ourselves.))
Gordon brings sledgehammers from magical practices and shamanic tradtions around the world, alongside a potent alternative canon of Western, and, well, pummels our walls a bit.
Tons of references packed in here, but a good place to start would be his books Chaos Protocols and Ani.Mystic (in order). Marek fell in love with Gordon's world through these three podcast episodes (one, two, three) and this lecture at the Guggenheim (with visual media from friend of the pod Refik Anadol).
Further references:
You already follow @avocado_ibuprofen. His memes IV-ed into the arm of the artworld, circulating through the DMs; they are acidic and thereaputic, they throw up solidarity through critique and gentle negation. We talk about art education, disappointment, exhaustion, glamour, and a beautiful idea (automating the viewer) he began to expand upon in an interview with Valentinas Klimašauskas here.
Buy his mugs.
Memes we discuss:
Few people have done more to define the contemporary media theory landscape than Alex Quicho @amfq, an indefinable thinker and artist and intellectual force who brought Girl Theory to the front and center of The Discourse.
One note, friend of the pod Morgane Billuart has also just released an interview with Alex on her excellent podcast Becoming the Product. We don't believe there's such a thing as too much AMFQ. Morgane is an upcoming guest for us too, so it's a nice trifecta!
In terms of Quicho-core:
On finishing the project of music, on TikTokCore and SpotifyCore, on music as cosplay and the technicity of cultural imperialism, on the bureaucratic turn in the arts, on being dangerous. Lecture given for my beloved DMR at Columbia University at the beginning of December.
Feeling a bit bolder than usual on this one, but it's cuz my toddler is sleeping good. <3
Shoutouts included at the top. Shoutouts to EPFL Pavilions and especially Jonathan Impett, who I revere, for giving me an initial platform for my obnoxious ideas.
Also — Liz Pelly’s new piece for Harpers is extremely relevant here: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/. Thanks to Micah Silver for pointing me to it, and for introducing me to Alex Reisner, who completely blew my mind open on the subject of copyright law.
Thanks to the Wire for distilling this entire thing into one sentence.
Reinforced shoutout to New Models we <3 u. Don't listen to this, listen to their interview w/ Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst instead.
2025 babyyyyyyyy
No notes, pure vivid realness and realism.
Li Zhenhua is a major force in the art world, especially in film.
A tone poem from Torino.
Marek's favorite episode.
Two of our discourse besties from UAL's Fashion Media Practice & Criticism -- experiential designers Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung -- join us to talk Janky Capitalism (the obvious falling-apart weirdness of the world while capital spins off farther and farther away from it, leaving us behind), Roblox, and neural media.
You probably know their work from the iconic 'The Metaverse in Janky Capitalism' on Dis and its associated 'Literally No Place' and 'Always on My Mind' -- or from associated speaking / discourse production all over the internet (++ more on Jenn (link) and Daniel (link)).
References from the pod include:
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is one of most important people in AI, and apart from his leadership position as CTO of Technology & Society at Google, he has one of those resumes or affiliations lists that seems to span a lot of very fundamental things. He’s amazing; the thoughtfulness and generosity with which he communicates on this episode gently embraced our brains while lazering them to mush. We hope you have the same experience.
References include:
A very warm welcome to Helena McFadzean, who is joining the Disintegrator wrecking crew.
This week’s episode features one of our favorite artists, Tega Brain. In this episode, we talk through two of our favorite pieces, both of which are not just great exercises in conceptual design, but are actual practical engineering projects whose artistry consists in real solutioning.
References from the pod:
Here’s a gem from our archive, a recording with Jonathan Impett — Director of Research at the Orpheus Instituut.
Impett has had a MAJOR impact on Roberto and Marek, a kind of intellectual godfather to the two of us. His staggering breadth of knowledge continues to blow our minds. You can find more about Impett's work here.
A number of references from the discussion include:
Majorly excited to have Patricia Reed on the pod. This is a beefy episode! If I was looking for a major reset in my relationship to the world around me, I'd start here.
Here’s a list of the references we make throughout the interview:
This episode features one of our most anticipated guests: M. Beatrice Fazi.
M. Beatrice Fazi is a philosopher working in philosophy of computation, philosophy of technology and media philosophy. In this episode we mostly cover some key definitions relating to computation and its onto-epistemology grounded in Fazi’s landmark book, Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics published in 2018. But our discussion doesn't end in 2018.
Now more than ever, Fazi`s work on computation holds unbelievable importance with wide-ranging implications. Philosophy is becoming a major foil to technocapital and technopolitics, forcing us to seriously (re)consider fundamental questions about technology and correlated fundamentals of knowledge and being.
Ever wondered what computation actually is? According to Fazi, it exists and unfolds not only as a function, but also as a creative modality forming its own conditions for existence. This episode dives deep into the concept of computation as an autonomous form of thought and creation, that is nevertheless contingent, i.e. not independent from the material conditions of the world.
We move further into Fazis more recent work in ontology: the triangulation of abstraction, representation and thought. This pushes us into massive questions - what does computation mean for the future of thought? How should we conceptualize the relationship between humans and technology? And why should we rethink the idea of technology as merely an extension of ourselves?
Relevant Links & References:
BACK with some of the world's foremost experts on NOISE: Mattin & Inigo Wilkins.
Relevant links include:
In this episode, Georgina Voss helps Roberto and Marek kick off on a journey to think about the relationship between human agency and political scale, specifically how that relationship is mediated by technology. The next few episodes will stick to this theme.
Georgina's work spans the arts, anthropology, policy, technology, cultural theory -- and, critical to this episode's scope: systems theory. Her new book Systems Ultra is a GREAT read, beginning with a kind of xenoanthropology of one of the tech sector's most... extra... events: the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
Georgina's work further referenced here includes:
This one is deep so see tons of explanatory resources below. The philosophy talk turns to political talk (easier to grok) after about 15 minutes, but the philosophical context adds a lot of richness to the latter conversation.
Patricia MacCormack is driving productive tension between philosophy and political action. Her Ahuman Manifesto is strongly recommended, even to those who may take issue with it in principle (anti-natalism! anti-idpol! anti-human!), because it makes a forceful argument for a politics based in empathy and care as applied to everyone and every thing.
Core concepts you might not be familiar with:
Creativity = sus.
Alex Reisner's writing in the Atlantic is some of the best investigative coverage of Large Language Models out there. In this episode, we talk through the mind-bogglingly vast archives of random pirated material that provide every major commercial LLMs with their linguistic faculty.
Definitely check out his writing on https://www.theatlantic.com/author/alex-reisner/, especially the phenomenal January 11 piece on "memorization."
ALSO -- if you haven't -- submit to our call for papers on AI interfaces: link! We'd love to have you.
Refik Anadol, and by extension Refik Anadol Studio, is one of the most visible, if not the most visible, artists working with large models today. His work is everywhere, from MoMa to the Biennale Venezia, from the very first Las Vegas Exosphere art display to the front of Walt Disney Concert Hall.
We’re delighted to have had him on the pod to talk through his artistic philosophy, touching specifically on media, light, AI, and his new incredibly large-scope Nature Model project announced back in January (approximately the same time we had our conversation with him — yes, the backlog is real).
We're also accompanied in the virtual studio with Pelin Kivrak, who writes as apart of Refik Anadol Studio.
Jennifer Walshe is one of the coolest people we know. Her artistic work and thought has broken our brains for years, leaving us shipwrecked in its torrential waves of reference and irony and joy and conceptual viscera.
We talk about her recent piece for the Unsound Dispatch, 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music — a series of vignettes that in their totality assemble into one of the most coherent accountings of what it is we’re all experiencing.
Some references from the ep:
Go here for more information about the upcoming talk that Roberto and Marek are doing Sunday, March 10, at 10AM Pacific. It's virtual, so come join us!!!
Anil Bawa-Cavia (AA Cavia) is one of our favorite writers and practitioners on the philosophy of computation. We discovered his work through Logiciel, on &&& (we <3 &&&!), both a gorgeous book in print and an elegant formal depiction of what computation might actually be (a definition that stands in striking contrast to the limitations imposed upon it by the humanities, or the comprehensive universality bestowed upon it by that particular breed of TEDx computational ‘realists’).
This conversation is a really nice parallel to Anil’s amazing chapter in Choreomata, in which he identifies the bottlenecks we are rapidly approaching through deep learning as, in part, products of incomplete thinking as to the nature of language, learning, their messy and entangled relationship to the “world,” and their reconsumptive throughput as it assembles into what we increasingly understand as something like intelligence.
We want this conversation to be accessible to as many listeners as possible, so here are some further references and definitions that might be useful:
Sofian Audry wrote Art in the Age of Machine Learning, an absolute canon read that contextualizes the contemporary flurry of creative AI application and detournement within a much longer lineage of human-machine relations. Their chapter in Choreomata straddles theory and practice, situating Sofian’s own work in the field of robotics within a history of questions: how do we communicate to an audience through and with machine performers? How does the external intelligibility of a system complicate its autonomy? How, and why, do we construct empathy with our machine collaborators?
In this conversation we discuss Sofian’s concept of Apprivoisement, a French term akin to domestication or taming, but one which leans into the mutuality of the relationship without the stain of dominance. We love this term and are eager to watch it seep into the discourse.
A few references from our conversation with Sofian:
Sasha Stiles writes poetry with and as machines. We first encountered her work as a direct, powerful rejoinder to the allegation that AI-generated work is cold, unfeeling, or lifeless. Her chapter in Choreomata underlines the technicity implicit in language and in poetics, positioning technology not as a thing one applies to language but instead as a mode of knowing inextricable from and in kinship with language.
A few references from the text:
Luciana Parisi has produced some of the 21st century’s most daring and bold work in the theories of cybernetics, information, and computation. Her work has had a major impact on both Marek and Roberto’s artistic practices, specifically her early work in the inorganic components of human reproduction.
Just a brief content note — we mention some complex topics including consent and suicide at the top of the pod, specifically in the context of David Marriott’s concept of “Revolutionary Suicide”. These concepts are not extensively discussed throughout, but are nonetheless heavy topics.
We strongly recommend three texts in parallel with this conversation:
First - come to our book launch, hosted by our friends at Foreign Objekt and organized by Sepideh Majidi. Dec 9 at 9AM Pacific: https://www.foreignobjekt.com/post/choreomata-book-launch-panel-ai-as-mass-performance.
Since both Roberto and Marek are traveling this week, we’re doing something a little different this time — Marek put together a solo-cast.
Marek and Roberto wrote the opening chapter of Choreomata, a thought-experiment about what happens to subjective experience when it is fully subcontracted out by the various routines of datafication and computation that comprise contemporary digital society. Academics and researchers constantly worry about the extent to which we are constructing AI in our own image, but in reality the reverse feels truer: we are constructing ourselves according to machine protocols.
This episode goes ham into a conjecture from the chapter: what if we have also overinscribed our own image onto capitalism? We propose a weird fever-dream in which the opposite is true: what if capitalism is detaching, lifting off, and departing from the immediate sphere of human events?
A pretty long reference list:
Jon McCormack has been investigating the relationships between machine intelligences and creativity for decades. In Episode 3, Jon joins Marek and Roberto to speak about the social and cultural implications of AI -- beginning with the parasitism that deep learning methodologies practice upon human culture and the downstream effects on how we think, learn, and act.
We had the privilege of meeting Jon at an event thrown by SensiLab, an incredible research facility founded by Jon within Monash University, at their Creative AI summit in Prato this past summer. For anyone interested in the creative dimensions of AI, we highly recommend exploring the link above.
A few notes from the conversation:
Tiziana Terranova has provided all of us with one of the sharpest critical accounts of the modern internet. In this episode, Tiziana, Roberto, and Marek discuss the labor dynamics at play in the contemporary digital economy -- from changes in the social status of creative work, the hidden labor underpinning the mechanics of the virtual world, and the material means by which AI resists pushes for decentralization.
We reference a few of Tiziana’s texts in the interview, which build foundational scaffolding for theories of what it means to live within networks:
Reza Negarestani has put together one of the strongest philosophical conceptions of Artificial General Intelligence. In this episode, Reza, Marek, and Roberto hit virtually every limit of AI theory -- from the outer banks of the "human", the boundaries of creativity and imagination, the borderlands of contemporary computation, and the social and political and aesthetic implications of all of the above. This episode is a great companion piece to not just Reza's chapter in Choreomata (Galatea Reloaded: Imagination Inside-Out Imagine) but his absolutely mindblowing work Intelligence and Spirit.
We reference a few texts in the interview:
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
