Envisioning an Electrifying Future volume complete (2025)

From Icons to AI: Evolution of Imagery in Religious Communication

Religion and Social Communication, 2023

Using icons in religious communication is a widespread practice that dates back many centuries. In various religions, icons have been instrumental in conveying religious messages, themes, and beliefs as religious leaders, artists, and craftsmen utilized icons to represent religious stories, rituals, and events visually. One of the main reasons images are used in religious communication is that they can effectively convey complex ideas and emotions that may be difficult to express through words alone. Thus, icons help not only to beautify sacred spaces but to make abstract concepts more tangible and accessible, making it easier for people to engage and understand otherwise lofty and abstract religious teachings. They also serve as powerful and evocative tools for inspiring devotion and promoting practices that can lead to increased participation in religious rituals and a more profound sense of connection to one’s faith. This paper aims to present the evolution of icons and understand whether AI-generated icons made possible today by generative AI tools can be employed in religious communication. In presenting the said theme, the following topics are unfolded: first, the use of symbols and icons across religions; second, the evolution of using images in various faiths; and third, the advent of AI-generated icons and the possibility of employing them as mediums of religious communication and education.

© Dr Rey Ty. (2024). Impact of AI-Powered Technology on Religious Practices and Ethics: The Road Ahead. In ARC journal, pp 340-374.

Rey Ty. (2024). Impact of AI-Powered Technology on Religious Practices and Ethics: The Road Ahead. In ARC journal, pp 340-374.

Are we done with (wordy) manifestos? Towards an introverted digital humanism

"Journal of Responsible Technology", n. 17, 2024

Beginning with a reconstruction of the anthropological paradigms underlying The Vienna Manifesto and The Onlife Manifesto (§ 1.1), this paper distinguishes between two possible approaches to digital humanism: an extroverted one, principally engaged in finding a way to humanize digital technologies, and an introverted one, pointing instead attention to how digital technologies can re-humanize us, particularly our "mindframe" (§ 1.2). On this basis, I stress that if we take seriously the consequences of the "mediatic turn", according to which human reason is finally recognized as mediatically contingent (§ 2.1), then we should accept that just as the book created the poietic context for the development of traditional humanism and its "bookish" idea of private and public reason, so too digital psycho-technologies today provide the conditions for the rise of a new humanism (§ 2.2). I then discuss the possible humanizing potential of digital simulated worlds: I compare the symbolic-reconstructive mindset to the sensorimotor mindset (§ 3.1), and I highlight their respective mediological association with the book and the video game, advocating for the peculiar thinking and reasoning affordances now offered by the new digital psycho-technologies (§ 3.2).

Exploring the Role of Generative AI in Enhancing Language Learning: Opportunities and Challenges

Deleted Journal, 2024

Artificial Optics: Contemporary Art and the Sociotechnical Imaginary of AI

A new trend appears to be emerging with certain artists working with AI and exhibitions promoting the technology. Often directly financed by Silicon Valley companies through residencies, grants or partnerships, these artists and exhibitions are contributing to the construction of a new paradigm: what art and technology scholar Joanna Zylinska refers to as "platform art" in "AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams”. I broaden her 2020 study by looking at newer aesthetic patterns that are emerging in what I argue is phantasmagoric: immersive, hypnotic, seductive, terrifying, and sometimes even giving off the impression of the ethereal, sacred and divine. Artists can deconstruct dominant, misleading narratives around AI innovation and look to the technology’s potential for positive outcomes. Instead, these artworks gloss over the power structures behind the development and deployment of these technologies and ultimately add to the ominous shadow being cast over the technology’s hidden functionalities, biases, underlying histories and Silicon Valley ideologies.

Conjuring algorithms - Understanding the Tech Industry as Stage Magicians

New Media & Society, 2024

In this article, we introduce the term “conjuration of algorithms” to describe how the tech industry uses the language of magic to shape people’s perceptions of algorithms. We use the image of the magician as a metaphor for how the tech industry strategically deploys narrative devices to present their algorithms. After presenting a brief history of the Western European and North American understanding of stage magic, we apply three principles of magic to a recent case: OpenAI’s discussion of ChatGPT to show how tech leaders present algorithms as magical entities. We argue that the conjuration of algorithms allows the tech industry to forge vivid, overly positive, and deterministic narratives that make it challenging for their critics to call attention to the very real harms that algorithmic systems pose to users. We call for discourses of reality instead of magic, as a way to support responsible technology design, development, use, and governance.

Figure – Mimesis as an instituting act in Deleuze’s thought

16th International Deleuze & Guattari Studies Conference, 2024

The aim of this talk is to provide a close reading of Deleuze’s complex account of the concept of Figure in Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation and in Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement. In the first part, I show that Deleuze’s theoretical work on the Figure implies an extensive discussion of the Greek vocabulary of the image. The Figure, he argues, is ‘an Image, an Icon’, that is, not an εἴδωλον but an εἰκών, not the reproduction of an ideal visuality but the rendering visible of forces that are not themselves visible, not a matter of producing a lifeless body, a corpse, as in Plato’s account of the image, but of a body without organs, which serves as a model for a different death, an impersonal death inscribed in the time of Αἰών, in implicating the possibility of having been repeated and of being repeated to infinity, all in liberating intensive differences on each occasion. In the second part, I argue that this internalization of death in and as Figure, involving an ever-returning event of transformation, entails a complete rethinking of mimesis, that is, no longer the production of resemblance, but the doubling of transformation, of aionic time itself. I propose to call this this mimetic commitment to transformation an ‘instituting act’ of the subject with a political dimension, in addition to an artistic one. Drawing on Deleuze’s dynamic interpretation of the institution and of the instituting act that both precedes it and follows it, protecting it from the entropy that threatens it, I will show that in the instituting process the subject does not preexist its own mimetic, instituting praxis, but comes into existence together with it, modifying it and simultaneously modifying itself.

Nonhumans with a face: faciality and the case of humanoids

2024, 16th International Deleuze & Guattari Studies Conference

On April 19th, 2015, Sophia, a humanoid manufactured by Hong-Kong based company Hanson Robotics, was activated. In October 2017, she obtained citizenship from Saudi Arabia, making her the first robot to ever obtain citizenship. Sophia operates using AI techniques that allow her to interact with her surroundings and sustain casual conversations, but what is considered the most important characteristic is her facial expressiveness, as she can display 62 different facial expressions. Her expressiveness together with the potentiality of manifesting emotive responses and forming social bonds, are key to her promotion as a successful AI system. But why is it so imperative for an AI humanoid to manifest such traits or even have a human-like face? In this paper, I will attempt to address the importance of Sophia’s face. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s work in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia and their analysis of the abstract machine of faciality, I will explore the ways through which Sophia becomes discursively gendered and racialized and thus facialized. I will then argue that structures of meaning such as race and gender create contradictions in the social discourse when they are used to describe a non-human body with a face, contradictions that make visible the mechanisms of the abstract machine of faciality. Finally, I will conclude by contemplating on the potentiality Sophia might enfold for a dismantling of the face and the creation of an alternative regime of signs.

Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference

Book of Abstracts, 2024

The 16th International Deleuze and Guattari Studies Camp and Conference focuses on processes of subjectification. This has been a longstanding concern of Deleuze and Guattari since their ground-breaking work, Anti-Oedipus (1972), which provides a tripartite theory of the production of subjectivity. Guattari further developed a schizoanalytic approach to social formations, extending Anti-Oedipus’s three syntheses into a more general account of three broader ecologies that are differentially enacted by environmental, social, and mental technics. Today, these ecologies can no longer be addressed in isolation by the sciences, humanities, and arts. Fifty years since Anti-Oedipus, this line of transversal thinking seems more pertinent than ever for thinking through becomings and subjectivation processes in the milieus of digital media ecologies, the changing techno- and noo-spheres engendered by hyperautomation, algorithmic governance, and increasingly systemic forms of disempowerment. Structured along the three interdependent syntheses and ecologies, the conference focuses on three socio-techno-environmental regimes: Intelligence, Instituting, and Archiving. Its goal is to revisit the material-discursive ecologies of instituting and archiving practices as critical and creative endeavours that may counter systemic stupidity and engender collective intelligence. Instead of pondering the question of what intelligence is, the event will address the pragmatics of how it happens, who institutes it, and through which technologies it is archived. Starting from (post-)Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts and methods, extended through feminist, queer, and decolonial critiques, the aim is to render visible the reciprocally determinant structure and operation of these three regimes and through what methods, modes, techniques, and technologies dis/individuating becomings come to be differentially enacted.

Machine learning's impact on medical education and research: beneficial or detrimental?

International journal of public health science, 2024