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<p>Announcing the latest title in Open Humanities Press's MEDIA :
ART : WRITE : NOW series:</p>
<p><i>Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of
Artificial Creative Intelligence </i>by Gary Hall<br>
</p>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/">http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/</a>
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style="color:windowtext"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="left" style="margin:0cm"><span
style="color:windowtext">Like all Open Humanities
Press books, <i>Masked Media </i>is available open access (=
it can be downloaded
for free)<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="left" style="margin:0cm"><b><span
style="color:windowtext"> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="left" style="margin:0cm"><b><span
style="color:windowtext">Book description<span></span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="left"
style="margin:0cm;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">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.<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="left"
style="margin:0cm;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="left"
style="margin:0cm;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><i>Masked
Media</i> 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. <i>Masked Media</i> 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.<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="left"
style="margin:0cm;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="left"
style="margin:0cm;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">In <i>Masked
Media</i>, a
follow-up to <i>A Stubborn Fury</i>, 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.<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="left"
style="margin:0cm;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><b> </b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="left"
style="margin:0cm;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><b>Author
bio</b><span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="left"
style="margin:0cm;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">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 <i>A
Stubborn Fury</i> (Open
Humanities Press, 2021), <i>Pirate Philosophy</i> (MIT Press,
2016)
and <i>The Uberfication of the University</i> (University of
Minnesota Press, 2016).<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="left"
style="margin:0cm;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><span> </span></p>
<p>(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.)</p>
<p></p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://postdigitalcultures.org/about/">https://postdigitalcultures.org/about/</a>
Director of Open Humanities Press: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.openhumanitiespress.org">http://www.openhumanitiespress.org</a>
Website <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.garyhall.info">http://www.garyhall.info</a>
Latest:
Blog posts: 'Making it Unfair, or Who Owns Creativity? AI, Copyright and the Battle for Wealth and Control', <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/2/25/making-it-unfair-or-who-owns-creativity-ai-copyright-and-the.html">http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/2/25/making-it-unfair-or-who-owns-creativity-ai-copyright-and-the.html</a>
'The Afterlife of the AI Author': <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/1/22/the-afterlife-of-the-ai-author.html">http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/1/22/the-afterlife-of-the-ai-author.html</a>
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): <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.robotreviewofbooks.org/">https://www.robotreviewofbooks.org/</a>
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