Prior Art: Patents, Geopolitics, Machines

edited by Anna Munster, Brett Neilson and and Ned Rossiter

  • Low Latencies
  • Published: forthcoming
  • ISBN: 978-1-78542-169-3
  • PDF ISBN: 978-1-78542-168-6

Forthcoming

All art is prior art. Every invention, every image, every algorithm carries the trace of a precedent, the labour, struggle, and ingenuity on which it is built. Patent law names this debt, encoding a structural anxiety about originality into the very system designed to reward novelty. In the territorially divided world of AI invention, overlapping and competing patent claims accumulate into thickets or fogs not easily navigated by small players. Platform sovereigns unleash exploits to extend their reach into territories, labour markets, and imaginaries that states can neither claim nor control.

Warehouses are the automated theatre of this geopolitical future present. They are saturated spaces – technical and shot through with labour power. Their automated vision generates worlds specific to the logistical circuit before any human interpreter arrives. These worlds are not representations of labour but its continuation by other means. Nothing in the image waits for confirmation. Prior Art cuts warehouses inside out, turning containment to contingency, formatted worlds to computational horror. Termination is not an alternative.

Editor Bios

Anna Munster is a professor specialising in media art, politics and contemporary technologies in the faculty of Art and Design, University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia. Munster also researches artificial intelligence and its relations and impact on visual culture. She is the leader of the Australian Research Council Project “Re-imaging the empirical: statistical visualisation in art and science”. Her major publications are An Aesthesia of Networks (2013) and Materializing New Media (2006), which won a ‘highly commended’ in the 2008 Prix Ars Electronica Media Research category. She is a founding member of the online peer-reviewed Fibreculture Journal and has published with Theory, Culture and Society, Inflexions, CTheory, and Computational Culture. Anna Munster is a practicing media artist collaborating with Michele Barker. Their artworks explore embodied perception, emphasising relations across sensory modalities and movement. Barker and Munster engage digital technologies, medical and scientific applications, and are interested in cultural and popular responses to science and technology. They have exhibited at The Science Gallery, Detroit, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, The Photographer’s Gallery, London, Museum of Art, Seoul and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney among others.

Brett Neilson is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He is author, with Sandro Mezzadra, of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor and The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism.

Ned Rossiter is Director of Research at the Institute for Culture and Society, and Professor of Communication, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University. His current book projects include Media of Decision and (with Soenke Zehle) The Experience of Digital Objects: Automation, Aesthetics, Algorithms.