Kanad Chakrabarti is an artist based in New York and London. His work intersects two dominant vectors of our time: computation and Existential Risks, starting from their origins in the global Cold War, through the long, bitter tail of 2008, and into the time of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). His current project engages with how humanity negotiates the complex ethical, politico-economic, and technological questions around designing an aligned AGI.
Articles
The Work of Art in the Age of Cybernetic Criticism
Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” wrestled with the effects of powerful technologies upon culture, and presaged much subsequent writing, e.g. Martin Heidegger and Italo Calvino. Here I want to consider not the artwork-qua-object as in Benjamin, but rather the work of art as an active force, in… Read More »
Of Bartleby & Blockchain: Digital Scriveners in the Age of Cryptocurrencies
Herman Melville wrote a story about a curious fellow, a scrivener: a clerk for his employer upon Wall Street, a “conveyancer and title hunter, and drawer-up of recondite documents”.[1] Bartleby’s disinclination to do any work was, repeatedly and almost without variation, couched in a phrase of maddening brevity and disturbing ambiguity. The man wasn’t quite… Read More »