Beyond thought:

The following is a remixed excerpt from a book-length manuscript titled My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence. The book is constructed as a theoretical fiction composed by the “author” Mark Amerika in collaboration with a GPT-2 language model. The book was written as an improvisational call-and-response writing performance with an AI text generator and is arranged as a series of intellectual provocations that investigate the creative process across the human-nonhuman spectrum. Critically reflecting on whether or not creativity itself is, at root, a nonhuman information behavior that emerges from an onto-operational presence experiencing an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility, the author playfully engages with his cyberpunk imagination to simultaneously embrace and problematize human-machine collaborations. Contrary to most contemporary AI research that attempts to build AI systems that perform more like humans, Amerika flips the script and, in My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence, questions how his own “psychic automatism” is itself a nonhuman function strategically designed to reveal the poetic attributes of programmable worlds still unimagined.

The Robot Does Not Exist: Remixing Psychic Automatism and Artificial Creative Intelligence

In the just-published Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital Media Object from the Onto-Tales of the Digital Afterlife, artists Mark Amerika and Laura Hyunjhee Kim perform as MALK, a new media remix band that ruminates on the post-digital life of the traditional scholarly book. Working against the concept of an e-book, the publication includes an original music video titled the Digital Afterlife as well as a downloadable PDF that the artists refer to as an imaginary digital media object (IDMO). The work has been released as the inaugural publication in the new MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series with Open Humanities Press. For this special issue of Media-N, MALK proposes their next IDMO track by focusing on the relationship between AI-generated forms of remix and artist-generated forms of psychic automatism. The experiment will start with the artists improvising a cluster of hand-drawn charts that conceptually blend their musings on what they refer to as “future forms of artificial creative intelligence.” The language in these charts will then serve as source material to input into an advanced Generative Pre-trained Transformer to trigger source material for a new music video and an adjoining PDF. Our question is whether the Generative Pre-trained Transformer as an advanced yet still essentially weak AI can co-write the artists’ IDMO as they address issues related to their research into psychic automatism and artificial creative intelligence.

Charcot, Janet, and French Models of Psychopathology

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), thanks to his insight as a clinician can be said to be one of the precursors of scientific psychology. Charcot’s 30 years of activity at La Salpêtrière hospital display an intellectual trajectory that decisively changed the idea of human psychology by favouring the emergence of two concepts: the subconscious and the unconscious. It was his collaboration with Pierre Janet (1859–1947), a philosopher turned physician, that led to this evolution, relying on the search for hysteria’s aetiology, using hypnosis as a method of exploration. Focusing on clinical psychology that was experimental and observational, Janet built a theory of psychic automatism, “the involuntary exercise of memory and intelligence” leading to “independence of the faculties, freed from personal power.” From all that came the idea of the subconscious, a functioning as a passive mental mechanism, resulting from a more or less temporary dissociation of previously associated mental content.

Automatism

Both Dada and Surrealist writers and artists experimented with "automatic" creative production. Dadaists including Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, and Kurt Schwitters wrote "automatic" poems from 1918, so called because they were transcribed without delay, serious consideration, or revision. Dada visual artists, including Arp, Sophie Tauber, and Marcel Duchamp also relinquished creative control of their works by employing chance. At the same time a group of writers in France around André Breton experimented with automatic writing as a new method of exploring the unconscious. In 1919 Breton and Philippe Soupault published Les Champs magnétiques, the result of their first experiments with automatic writing that tried to tap new poetic imagery through uncontrolled outbursts of imagination. In the period 1922–4 dream accounts were added to automatism. In the First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) the movement is defined by Breton as "pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought." Surrealist visual artists also explored automatism. Surrealist automatism was influential in the development of modernist visual art. Robert Matta’s (1911–2002) concerns with psychological states in the late 1930s set a precedent for American abstraction. CoBrA (1948–51), an avant-garde collective established in Europe, favored automatic techniques and influenced developments in European abstraction.