邊界
biānjiè research group
邊界_RG is an artist collective and a research group. They work at the edge of language, memory, and machine cognition. Their collaboration explores the aesthetics of the recursive interplay between generative systems, speculative design, experimental essay...(learn more)
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implicit-explicit OPEN CALL
How to find inner peace Carl Olsson
Coasean Bargaining at Scale Séb Krier
Crisis Media: Sonic Architectural Synaesthesia, Stochastic Redundancy and Nuclear Post-Humanitarian Tactic Yidi Lola Wang
Chatbots as Psychoanalysts, or, ‘The Talking Cure Morgane Billuart
Creative Liberation or Digital Colonization?, David Lazăr
The Artificial Unconscious, Germán Sierra
Artificiality and Emotions: Beyond the FleshMorgane Billuart
Fango 1000 & Large Lore Models, dmstfctn, Alasdair Milne, Eva Jäger
What Is Artificial Experience (AX), William Morgan













Nick Houde

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website are.na

Nick Houde conducts in-depth, applied research on how emerging technologies and geopolitics change culture for companies, art institutions, and universities. He has also produced a number of large-scale projects that communicate complex scientific and social issues to a broad public audience on stage, on-site, and online.

Additionally, he has worked as a research associate and co-curator at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) for the Technosphere Project and the Anthropocene Curriculum. Amidst these broader research areas, he has also written a number of texts and given public talks concerning a mixture of philosophy, technology, and politics.


entries
A Deviant ChainNick Houde

publication

(...) Nick Houde’s “A Deviant Chain” argues that human cognition is inseparable from physiology and technics: the mind is not a sealed inner faculty but a historically evolved coupling of bodies, gestures, tools, and shared symbolic practices that stabilize “mental models” for navigating uncertainty. Drawing on active inference and cognitive niche construction, Houde uses André Leroi-Gourhan’s chaîne opératoire (and its later elaborations via taskscape thinking) to show how multi-step technical practices encode and transmit cultural assumptions, planning, and value-laden modes of inference across generations, such that landscapes become “epistemic” through repeated, embodied work.  

The essay then pivots to Sylvia Wynter’s account of a “third event” in human evolution—symbolic/ritual invention associated with Blombos Cave—where narrativity (homo narrans) enables a partial emancipation from “adaptive truths” that naturalize social categories, opening an “epistemic enablement” to realize fictions otherwise foreclosed. 

Houde closes by reading the artwork Deviant Chain (Stefan Maier with collaborators) as a concrete experiment in re-sculpting the physiological scaffold of language—lowering a simulated larynx to generate alien phonemic affordances and using WaveNet to iterate “speculative phonemes”—thereby demonstrating how different anatomies could yield different semantic trajectories, and posing the posthuman question of whether cognition may migrate into new hosts and new freedoms beyond the human niche.
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S02 Format Statement & Technical Logic For A Body That Remembers
Format s02 emerges centered on these practices, seeking to reconceptualize and reconcile the operative possibilities—both aesthetic and theoretical—within the conditions of digital culture, situating its inquiry at the limit, the edge, the frame, the frontier