Warren Neidich, A Proposition for an alt-Parthenon Marbles Recoded: The Phantom as Others, #2, 2023

Warren Neidich (Berlin, New York), in his neon glass sculpture A Proposition for an Alt-Parthenon Marbles Recoded: The Phantom as Others # 2, (2023), proposes that the illusory sensations of imaginary phantom limbs might operate metaphorically as a means of empowerment to the future despotism of what the French political philosopher Antoinette Rouvroy calls algorithmic governmentality or what Bonaventura de Sousa Santaos calls epistemicide. Neidich’s work is directed against the recurring cycle of historical expropriation and algorithmic bias that seems to be at the heart of the Enlightenment and that is manifesting itself again in our present- and future-biased algorithmic culture (based on, for instance, Chat GPT). This speculative philosophical sculpture is presented as a deep learning neural network or open AI, beginning with a photo of the Parthenon Marbles—formerly known as the Elgin Marbles— fixed to aluminum and situated at the bottom of the work and forming its inner layer. The inner layer of deep learning networks is the entry point for patterns of data and is the first step of processing. Psychic energy emanates from two sources in the sculpture. The first is the ghosts that emerge from the imaginary phantom limbs of the marbles’ amputated arms and legs, which represent the other, ancestral energy, queering, the post-colonial, and the specter of Marx. These mix or blend in with the second source which are emanations from the human-like figures that make up the image of the classical sculpture itself. (This sculpture and others like it from the classical period helped to form the basis of the scientific-rational discourse of the Western European Enlightenment tradition.) The two inputs blend, in the process educating, pruning, and assembling the connections of the next processing layer or the hidden layer(s) of the open AI. This induction transforms the connections at the beginning of the hidden layer—connections such as Western civilization, the universal museum, and algorithmic bias—into new components such as composting, cognitive justice, and the pluriverse. These constitute in turn the output that transforms the digital singularity into the alt-singularity. (The singularity is a term invented by Ray Kurzweil to describe the hypothetical moment at which machine intelligence might outperform human intelligence.) Neidich’s alt-Singularity is a cybernetic post-human superintelligence that is global, affective, and caring, in contrast to the optimized and repetitive dystopian Kurzweillian right-wing accelerationist nightmare.