“Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, introduced in the early 1940s, apply well today, in a world where “technology now exists to create autonomous weapons that can select and kill human targets without supervision”. We need to set limits. Or to challenge them, like algebraic topology does with our intuitive concept of equality. Unmapped lands, once marked with lions and dragons, are now digital artefacts on Google Maps. Fact-checking can help you debunk a Wikipedia entry, or make you travel to the upper Euphrates valley, where an old man will show you the oldest Bible ever found – if it isn’t a forgery. Speaking of fake news: What is information independently from meaning, and what are its limits?

This brings us to computer chess, on which the father of information theory, Shannon, published a groundbreaking paper in 1949; years later, IBM’s Deep Blue would defeat Kasparov in a momentous ‘human vs. machine’ competition. In a movie, we instinctively accept and follow the spatial rules that regulate the tension between on- and off-frame; in other fields, limits are often more blurred or controversial – destruction can come from the same steel plant that is giving work to a whole city. Occulto Issue h ends with an army of human-robot hybrid creatures going out of control and attacking humans, but don’t panic: it’s only fiction, science fiction, just like the Laws of Robotics we started with.”

Abgerundet wird das Themenspektrum durch Kunstrprojekte von Ana Botezatu, Ilaria Cannavà, Jonathan Gobbi, Natalia Trejbalova, Giulia Liberti, Matteo Nobile, Marco Furlani und Pep Vidal. Desweiteren liegt der Zeitschrift eine Compilation mit von Boring machines ausgewählter Musik bei. Zu hören sind Barnacles, Dream Weapon Ritual, Dörchæ, The Great Saunites, Adamennon, Dope in The Pig Bags, MZKY, Niton, Balance, PRG/M, Luigi Pugliano. Die Präsentation enthält Vorträge und Diskussionen mit Herausgeberin Alice Cannavà und weiteren mitwirkenden und wird durch ein DJ-Set abgerundet.

Freitag, 19. Januar
20-23 Uhr
Zabriskie – Buchladen für Kultur & Natur
Manteuffelstr.73
10999 Berlin

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