[spectre] Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence by Gary Hall: new open access book

[Gary Hall]

Announcing the latest title in Open Humanities Press's MEDIA : ART :
WRITE : NOW series:

/Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial
Creative Intelligence /by Gary Hall

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/

Like all Open Humanities Press books, /Masked Media /is available open
access (= it can be downloaded for free)

**

*Book description*

If we want a socially and environmentally just future, do we need a
radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory? It’s this
question Gary Hall and his collaborators have been addressing for over
twenty years with experimental publishing projects such as Open
Humanities Press, Liquid and Living Books, and the Culture-Led
Re-Commoning of Cities. Unsettling received ideas of the author and the
book, originality and copyright, real and artificial intelligence, these
uncommon communities of theorist-mediums are testing the
‘non-modernist-liberal’ modes of creating and sharing knowledge enabled
by various media technologies, from writing and print, through
photography and video, to computers and GenAI. By thinking outside the
masked black box that renders Euro-Western knowledge-making practices
invisible – keeping the human ontologically separate from the nonhuman,
be it animals, the planet or algorithmic machines – they show there’s no
such thing as the human, the nonhuman already being in(the)human.

/Masked Media/ is one such experimental project. It is not a
‘human-authored’ work. Instead, the thinking within it has been
generated by a radically relational assemblage that includes AI and
more. Although the book appears under a real name – ‘Gary Hall’ – which,
like Banksy and Karen Eliot, acts as a mask, it is not the intellectual
property of a singular human individual, and is published under a
Collective Conditions for Re-Use licence to reflect this. /Masked
Media/ shows how such norm-critical experimentation is of vital
importance to our understanding of everything, from identity politics
and the decolonisation of knowledge, through epistemologies of the
Global South and the possibilities of open city infrastructure, to
extractive capitalism, planetary destruction and the Anthropocene. It
thus constitutes a call to radically redesign theory for a time of
multiple crises.

In /Masked Media/, a follow-up to /A Stubborn Fury/, Hall proceeds to
show how our ways of writing and working can be reinvented to produce a
more socially just future after the years of austerity and the
coronavirus pandemic.

**

*Author bio*

Gary Hall is an experimental critical theorist working at the
intersection of digital culture, politics and technology. He is
Professor of Media at Coventry University, UK, where he served as
founding director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures from 2017 to
2025. He is the author of a number of books, including /A Stubborn
Fury/ (Open Humanities Press, 2021), /Pirate Philosophy/ (MIT Press,
2016) and /The Uberfication of the University/ (University of Minnesota
Press, 2016).

(Apologies for the self-promotion. But since I'm the one often
responsible for sending such messages on behalf of OHP, I guess it's
going to happen, if only now and again.)

--
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University:
https://postdigitalcultures.org/about/

Director of Open Humanities Press:http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
Websitehttp://www.garyhall.info


Latest:

Blog posts: 'Making it Unfair, or Who Owns Creativity? AI, Copyright and the Battle for Wealth and Control',http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/2/25/making-it-unfair-or-who-owns-creativity-ai-copyright-and-the.html

'The Afterlife of the AI Author':http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/1/22/the-afterlife-of-the-ai-author.html

Recommended: Feeding the Machine by James Muldoon, Mark Graham and Callum Cant, in the AI 'magazine' Robot Review of Books (now also featuring This Podcast Does Not Exist):https://www.robotreviewofbooks.org/





















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