AA Cavia is a computer scientist and writer. In 2009 he founded a speculative software studio, STD-IO. His practice engages with machine learning, protocols, encodings, and other software artefacts. He has spoken and exhibited internationally at institutions such as Jan van Eyck Academie, ZKM, SPACE Studios, and Medialab Prado Madrid. He has served as an instructor at The New Centre of Research & Practice and his seminar notes have been published as a book by &&& entitled Logiciel: Six Seminars on Computational Reason.
Articles
Shannon’s Demon
Consider an information sponge so vast it amasses a billion suns—absorbing all surrounding structure and pattern, its interior would converge on a maximal entropy state. Matter succumbing to its gravitational spell would find itself drawn into a gaseous vortex, a chaotic collapse of form and order, approaching a singularity in which spacetime itself is infinitely compressed. An accretion disk would form a nebulous halo around this dark region, marking it out as an indiscriminate attractor of light, its sheer density trapping matter in a photonic cell of its own making. Such galactic nuclei, namely black holes, serve as the principal discursive site of information theory in physics, setting the stage for contested claims regarding the nature of encoding.
Stupidity & Geist: A Review of Intelligence and Spirit by Reza Negarestani
How does a book arrive in the world? In the case of Reza Negarestani’s ‘Intelligence and Spirit’ (I&S), the text appears to burst forth as from a breached dam – Hegelian tributaries, Sellarsian currents and Turing tides previously stemmed by a conceptual blockage so immense as to constitute a fatberg of thought. This stagnation is down… Read More »