AI futures have migrated from hyperbolic visions of finely-tuned embodied intelligences and towards cloud-based multimodal models accessed via conventional user interfaces. The early concern that machines would too-efficiently emulate the lofty, ineffable qualities of humanness has swiftly morphed into its inverse, where humans become ever more machinic, automatable, and computable. The uncanny valley runs backwards now: we feel a psychic revulsion from ourselves, who have become doomscrollers, prompt engineers, neural media psychonauts, and otherwise embodiments of our own platform avatars. The net effect has been the wholesale dissolution of “the human”—whatever that was—as a special thing.
With contributions from: Gilbert Again, Maya Indira Ganesh, Angie Keefer, Alex Quicho, Noura Tafeche, William Wiebe
Edited by William Wiebe, Duncan Bass, Benjamin Tiven
Designed by Synoptic Office
Published within the context of Proof of Personhood, organized and held at the Singapore Art Museum from 22 September 2023 to 25 February 2024.
Exhibition Curator: Duncan Bass
Exhibition Coordinator: Anisah Aidid
Exhibition Supervisor: Dr. June Yap
Exhibition Artists: Song-Ming Ang, Zach Blas & Jemima Wyman, Cécile B. Evans, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Charmaine Poh, Christopher Kulendran Thomas with Annika Kuhlmann, William Wiebe
ISBN: 978-1-7373700-4-8
ePub format
2025
Published by End of Medium / Singapore Art Museum
Release Date: October 2025
Purchase from Apple Books
Online access at Library Stack
Artist Sam Lewitt in conversation with Paul North and Paul Reitter, who recently published their new English edition of Karl Marx’s Capital. Lewitt’s own engagement with Marx’s writing anchors his multi-format reflections on (or interventions into) systems of capital flows, production lines, technological obsolescence, phantom infrastructures and dissipating human labor. Diving deeply into both the German literary canon and Lewitt’s idiosyncratic sculpture and installation practice, this conversation traces the wave of resurgent interest in Marx’s theories and critiques of capital within the visual arts over the past two decades, and maps Lewitt’s diverse deployment of Marxian concepts.
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