[spectre] Thinking with AI and Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence - two open access books

[Gary Hall]

And to complete the look back over the  books published by Open 
Humanities Press in 2025...

April saw the publication of Thinking with AI, edited by Hannes Bajohr:

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/thinking-with-ai/

And March, /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/

---

Thinking with AI, edited by Hannes Bajohr:

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/thinking-with-ai/

This edited volume explores a novel approach to the intersection of 
artificial intelligence and the humanities, proposing that instead of 
merely writing about AI, scholars should think with AI. Rather than 
treating AI as an external subject of study, the essays explore how 
concepts from artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data 
science can provide ways to rethink core humanistic questions of 
meaning, representation, and culture.

Critical AI Studies typically focuses on AI’s societal implications—its 
role in surveillance, exclusion, and global capitalism. This volume 
extends that critique, but also explores how AI brings our already 
existing understanding of aesthetics, language, history, and knowledge 
into relief and stands in an often productive conflict with them. AI’s 
pattern recognition and generative capabilities, for example, provokes 
new ways to grasp aesthetic unity, reimagine language as an autonomous 
system, and reconsider the boundaries between text and image.

The essays illustrate how AI can be used as a productive metaphor and 
intellectual tool for the humanities. From formalizing concepts like 
Stimmung and vibe to challenging traditional distinctions between 
writing and thought or between history and data, the book shows how AI 
can be not just an object of study but a conceptual catalyst that 
ignites unexpected connections to long-standing humanistic concerns. By 
engaging AI in this way, scholars can not only critique it but also 
expand the horizons of their own fields.

With essays by Peli Grietzer, Leif Weatherby, Mercedes Bunz, Hannes 
Bajohr, Fabian Offert, Lev Manovich, Babette Babich, Markus Krajewski, 
Orit Halpern, Christina Vagt and Audrey Borowski.

Editor Bio

Hannes Bajohr is Assistant Professor of German at the University of 
California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the history of German 
philosophy in the 20th century, political theory, and theories of the 
digital and AI. Bajohr’s academic texts have appeared in Configurations, 
Poetics Today, and New German Critique, among others. His most recent 
books are Schreibenlassen: Texte zur Literatur im Digitalen (Berlin: 
August, 2022), Ad Judith N. Shklar: Leben, Werk, Gegenwart (with Rieke 
Trimçev, Hamburg: EVA, 2024), and Digitale Literatur zur Einführung 
(with Simon Roloff, Hamburg: Junius, 2024); in 2025, his book 
Postartifizielle Texte: Schreiben nach KI will come out with Suhrkamp. 
Bajohr is also active as a writer of digital literature. His most recent 
work is the novel (Berlin, Miami) (Berlin: Rohstoff, 2023), which was 
co-written with a self-trained large language model.


Like all Open Humanities Press books, Thinking with AI is available open 
access (and can be downloaded for free):

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/thinking-with-ai/


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/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/

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).




-- 
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University

Director of Open Humanities Press:http://www.openhumanitiespress.org 
Blog:http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/

Latest:

Journal issue: Ecologies of Dissemination issue of PARSE Journal #21 - Summer 2025, edited by Eva Weinmayr and Femke Snelting:https://parsejournal.com/journal/#ecologies-of-dissemination. (I'm one of the contributors to this experimental issue which emphasizes collective over individual authorship.)

Video: 'Liquidate AI Art', Computer Arts Society:https://www.bcs.org/events-calendar/2025/october/webinar-liquidate-ai-art

Talk: 'The Independent Intellectual vs Posting Zero and the Dead Internet':http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2025/12/2/the-independent-intellectual-vs-posting-zero-and-the-dead-in.html




















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