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<div>Dear All,</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce details of an
upcoming online symposium based around a discussion of my new
book, <i><a
href="http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/"
target="_blank">Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the
Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence</a> </i>(London: Open
Humanities Press, 2025; open access).<br>
<br>
Friday 12th of September, 2025 <br>
9:30 – 11:30 am Mexico City</div>
<div>11.30-13.30 Ann Arbour</div>
<div>16.30-18.30 London</div>
<div>via Zoom<br>
<br>
With: <br>
Peter Baker (University of Stirling)<br>
Alexandra Anikina (University of Southampton)<br>
Gareth Williams (University of Michigan)<br>
Benjamín Mayer-Foulkes (17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos)<br>
Gabriela Méndez-Cota (Culture Machine/Universidad Iberoamericana)<br>
<br>
Co-organised by the electronic journal <a
href="https://culturemachine.net/" target="_blank">Culture
Machine</a> and <a href="https://diecisiete.org/masked-media/"
target="_blank">17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos</a> 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 <a
href="https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/"
target="_blank">conversations around infrapolitics</a>, its
focus is broader: on writing, subjectivity, students, ourselves,
and on how to respond to the conditions we’re living through
today.<br>
<br>
To join this event online, email: <a
href="mailto:enlace@17edu.org" target="_blank"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">enlace@17edu.org</a><br>
<br>
---<br>
<br>
<a
href="http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/"
target="_blank">On Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in
the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence</a> [open access]<br>
<br>
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. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><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 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.
<br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<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>
Blog: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/">http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/</a>
Latest:
Book: Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/">http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/</a>
Blog post: 'The Commons vs Creative Commons III: Some Problems, Distinctions and Alternatives - Including Signals, CC's Response to AI': <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/9/1/the-commons-vs-creative-commons-iii-some-problems-distinctio.html">http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/9/1/the-commons-vs-creative-commons-iii-some-problems-distinctio.html</a>
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