[spectre] Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence: online event, 12 Sept

[Gary Hall]

Dear All,

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce details of an upcoming 
online symposium based around a discussion of my new book, /Masked 
Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative 
Intelligence 
<http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/> 
/(London: Open Humanities Press, 2025; open access).

Friday 12th of September, 2025
9:30 – 11:30 am Mexico City
11.30-13.30 Ann Arbour
16.30-18.30 London
via Zoom

With:
Peter Baker (University of Stirling)
Alexandra Anikina (University of Southampton)
Gareth Williams (University of Michigan)
Benjamín Mayer-Foulkes (17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos)
Gabriela Méndez-Cota (Culture Machine/Universidad Iberoamericana)

Co-organised by the electronic journal Culture Machine 
<https://culturemachine.net/> and 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos 
<https://diecisiete.org/masked-media/> in Mexico City, the event is 
hosted by the Laboratory of Contemporary Writings / Laboratorio de 
Escrituras Contemporáneas, which is being launched with this event. The 
idea for the Laboratory of Contemporary Writings emerged from a recent 
ACLA Seminar titled ‘Displacing Academic Practices in the Ruins of the 
Neoliberal University’. While linked to conversations around 
infrapolitics 
<https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/>, its 
focus is broader: on writing, subjectivity, students, ourselves, and on 
how to respond to the conditions we’re living through today.

To join this event online, email: enlace at 17edu.org

---

On Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial 
Creative Intelligence 
<http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/> [open 
access]

If we want a more socially and environmentally just future, do we need a 
radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory? It’s this 
question that 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, Radical Open Access 
Collective, and the Culture-led Re-Commoning of Cities. Unsettling 
received ideas of the author and book, originality and copyright, real 
and artificial intelligence, these uncommon communities of 
theorist-mediums have been testing some of the ‘non-modernist-liberal’ 
modes of creating and sharing knowledge that are 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 the anthropocentric, Euro-Western knowledge-making practices of 
the arts and humanities invisible – ensuring the human is kept 
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 inhuman 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 demonstrates 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.

-- 
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
Blog:http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/


Latest:

Book: Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence:http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/

Blog post: 'The Commons vs Creative Commons III: Some Problems, Distinctions and Alternatives - Including Signals, CC's Response to AI':http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/9/1/the-commons-vs-creative-commons-iii-some-problems-distinctio.html

























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