邊界
biānjiè research group
邊界_RG its 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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The Artificial Unconscious, Germán Sierra
Artificiality and Emotions: Beyond the FleshMorgane Billuart
Fango 1000 & Large Lore Models, dmstfctn, Alasdair Milne, Eva Jäger
Self Stalking Prey: A Study for a Portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, Carl Olsson
How Images Turned Invisible, Ivan Netkachev
What Is Artificial Experience (AX), William Morgan
Design in Rising Winds, Flora Weil
 What we do in the shadows. Ivar Frisch, Jenn Leung, Chloe Loewith
The A-Subject & Its Consequences.  Alexandre Montserrat
Lexical Report of the Linguistic Visualization Test Program Ian Margo
Eschatology of the Digital Visage, Giorgi Vachnadze













publication artwork game

(...) Fango 1000 is a multiplayer onchain text game where players compete for narrative control. The game is set in the fictional medieval village of Fango, where a trove containing a thousand chronicles has suddenly appeared inside a monastery, each describing the training of a mysterious 'machine intelligence' from the future.

Players join either Monks, Scholars or Fools - factions with conflicting worldviews - and compete to tell stories about what secret the machine may hold. Some writing will persist by player consensus, other writing will be lost.

The game tasks players with interpreting AI from a mediaeval point of view. Yet the ‘soft’ stories written by a community of players must comply with the ‘hard’ facts inscribed in the chronicles - which contain data generated by players of dmstfctn’s AI training game Godmode Epochs (2023), data now inscribed onto a blockchain, and discoverable in the world of Fango 1000.

The game implements a protocol for onchain narrative building that explicitly links player’s actions to their (contestable) stories. The protocol was originally proposed in ‘Large Lore Models’ (Autonomous Worlds N1, 2023), an essay by dmstfctn, Eva Jäger and Alasdair Milne describing the problem of narrative capture in onchain worlds...(more)

The Artificial Unconscious
Germán Sierra


publication

(...) The internet might have become the Library of Babel or a Dark Forest, but it will never be an agent per se. The internet-as-archive does not develop a perception of the world of its own. When the surrealists tried to make the unconscious speak by itself, they had no means to deactivate their own consciousness: even with automatic writing, psychedelic drugs, and the inspiration of dreams, they were always aware of the process of transforming the work of the unconscious into art. Neither experimental art including a variable degree of randomness or probabilistic combinations (ie. some abstract expressionism, Oulipo writings, etc.) was able to capture or imitate the complex dynamics of the unconscious. Until now —including psychoanalytical therapy—, we had no other means but the human body for expressing the unconscious. This is, at least in part, because humans evolved by using media mostly as a substrate for transmissible knowledge. What makes generative media so confusing is that generative media —very much like the unconscious— are processes, not knowledge. These processes became functional requirements for consciousness without being strictly knowable, and they cannot be stored or understood as knowledge or data. It’s the process of dreaming, not the remembered content of some dreams, what might be essential for human consciousness —which is why the interpretation of dreams is probably the weakest point of psychoanalysis...(more)
Artificiality and Emotions: Beyond the Flesh
Morgane Billuart


publication

(...) While many would argue that the fundamental “otherness” and “distance” offered by such apps and interfaces might be a limitation, it is relevant to reclaim how projected fascinations and desires for distant and absent objects of desire are key components of humans’ emotional build-up. As suggested in the book Mating in Captivity, in which Esther Perel studies the psychological tricks and downfalls of marriage and monogamy, she writes: “When people become fused—when two become one—connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.”20 -“Otherness is a fact. You don’t need to cultivate separateness in the early stages of falling in love; you still are separate.You aim to overcome that separateness.”21...(more)
  What is Artificial Experience (AX)? Why the Application Layer Is the Interface and the Human Is the Limit
William Morgan



publication

(...) Artificial experience does not refer to just any technologically mediated interaction; it is precisely the kind of experience that is uniquely enabled by AI’s infrastructural properties. AX asks explicitly: 'What experiential affordances can AI uniquely deliver that no other medium, tool, or infrastructure could?' This question is infrastructural specificity in action, which I take to be a hallmark of AX design.
Furthermore, AX only emerges when the infrastructural intelligence of AI becomes ubiquitous enough to disappear into habit. In other words, experience is what remains when infrastructure is no longer visible. For this reason, AX design is not about the direct perception of intelligence, but rather the surprising, yet welcome experiences that you didn't anticipate but are glad to encounter...(more)
Design in Rising Winds
Flora Weil

publication
(...) What might we learn from materials that refuse our models? Nora Khan proposes thinking of AI as "as a primordial force of nature, like a star system or a hurricane — something strong, but indifferent."50 Perhaps sand offers another metaphor: intelligence as that which slips between categories, accumulating into new forms through its very resistance to capture. As Catherine Malabou states, "Intelligence 'is' not; rather, it only exists through its own transformations."51 These demon cities and herd kindergartens show us perhaps that notions that have come to define our species–intelligence, evolution–emerge precisely from where our models fail. What might science look like when it mirrors the incoherent, the unsound, and the anomalous? In a project describing future human-AI interactions,...(more)

Self-Stalking Prey: A Study for a Portrait of Little Red Riding Hood
Carl Olsson

publication

(...) Ronald Fairbairn had a simpler interpretation, describing the story as a tale about Little Red Riding Hood’s ‘own incorporative need in the form of a devouring wolf’8: a showcase of an early oral dynamic rooted in unsatisfied hunger rather than sexual competition. The recurrent vore fantasies (the wolf swallowing its victims whole) are cast as pre-Oedipal, more to do with hunger and infantile disappointment in the nourishing mother than the family triad; and it is in terms of hunger that we will think about theory replacement and the exhaustion of ‘our’ conceptual dependency on the inherited concept of subjectivity.

Departing from the psychodynamic interpretations, I want to consider Little Red Riding Hood as a conceptual rather than psychological drama that may, however, attain psychological import in due course. It is a developmental allegory for the self-effacement of the language that makes us ‘us’, such as in moving from an image of ourselves as rational agents to biological objects that can be explained. The little girl is a werewolf preying on herself. It is a story about self-overcoming in the double sense that it is a about the effacement of the subject as a theoretical entity and about an effacement that unfolds as the result of a dialectic initiated by the subject itself. The deep forest is a stage for a conceptual clash...(more)


Lexical Report of the Linguistic Visualization Test Program Based on Relational Meaning and Etymological Coordinates
Ian Margo


What we do in the shadows
Ivar Frich, Jenn Leung, Chloe Loewith



(...)When ‘seeing in the light is blindness’24, and when the epistemology of light is being replaced by an epistemology of darkness, can we still think of contemporary computation, and thus AI alignment, as something which mirrors human thoughts and values? 

Artist Diemut Strebe and Brian Wardle, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, collaborated on an arts and science project to create the blackest black material to date. In an interview Wardle proposes that the darkest material is ‘is a constantly moving target’25. The aerospace community celebrates darkness to prevent glare; perhaps this same principle needs to be redirected toward alignment research. As Pasquinelli asks, “will darkness ever have its own medium of communication? Will it ever be possible to envision a medium that operates via negation, abduction, absence, the void, and the non-luminous?”...(more)

The A-Subject & Its Consequences
Alexandre Montserrat

publication
(...) What, then, is the A-Subject? Not diminished humanity, but an entirely other ontology: a form of subjectivity existing only as an emergent property of the apparatus that generates it. From this reality, a new paradigm for sovereignty is established. Sovereignty ceases to be the localized will of a king or a citizenry. It dissolves, becoming the distributed, operational capacity of technical architectures themselves. Here, power no longer resides in the authority to command, but in the infrastructural capacity to generate subjectivity as an effect; to define the parameters of the knowable through the structuring of data; and, most crucially, to foreclose potentiality by relentlessly processing the probable. The horizon of what can be shrinks to what the system predicts is likely to be... (more)
Text Box: Eschatology of the Digital Visage
Algorithmic Flesh and Confessional
Aesthetics in the Work of Ian Margo
Giorgi Vachnadze


publication

(...) In this sense, its failure is generative. To fail to be computable is to refuse the enclosure of meaning. Margo’s work is, once again, not Turing-Computable, it’s Deleuze-Computable, that is to say; demonically machinic. To become unbaptized data is to remain in the domain of the Real. Like the Eucharist consumed without transubstantiation, the Wet Box leaves a pure residue, an aftertaste of what should have become body, and didn’t; it became flesh. The interface compounds the syntax error in stutters. The glitch is a processual breaking in execution and expectation. We expected sense. We were given endless remainder – lack...(more)
Ruins without nostalgia
Marcos Parajua


publication

(...) What remains after an event? Does language prevail over an image or a sound in presenting “that which remains”? Edmund Burke invokes Milton: “(Over) many a dark and dreary (valley) They (passed), and many a region dolorous; (Over) many a frozen, many a fiery Alp; Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens, and shades of Death”. Burke contends: “This idea or this affection caused by a word (Death), which nothing but a word could annex to the others…”.1 In this saying, the ways of romantic visual arts are too articulate to lend proper care to indeterminacy. Retrospectively we might argue that Burke contemplated abstraction exclusively as “thought” realised in language but I´d rather follow a different inquiry. Burke also conceives descriptive language an insufficient correlate of the object described; this, he observes, is not a problem of clarity but intensity. To bridge the difference...(more)

Third Extension, a brief essay
on technology and language
Ian Margo

publication artwork video


After Notre Dame / burning_church / techno-linguistic program for the Artic Circle
Arash Farhadi

publication

(...) When the ocean retreats, an extensive desert emerges / the museum lies across it, 9 days on foot, 1 more day for the cult. We studied the cathedral's blueprints hoping to find signs of the assassination / my beloved new face is built upon abstract machines. It narrates the face being performed, the burning territory / in a dream, the cathedral was burning. The verticality of the structure / the verticality of the fire / manifested the mediocrity of the fall, its numbness. We imagined forests surrounding the ruins of what we had annihilated / burning_church rises from my beloved new face or, rather, detaches from it, taking the form of a museum in a desert; you will reach this -final- place, and, once arrived, there will be nothing left to do / Arabesque Dune / the face in burning_church emerges around the mask - "worship of the body" / body in flames / the flute inside Saddam’s bunker, and the air runs out...(more)
How Images Turned Invisible
Ivan Netkachev



(...) For this exact reason, images are not inherently visual: they are defined by a paradoxical configuration of forces. A flat, two-dimensional surface happens to be a perfect place for the resolution of these momenta. But some images never arrive there, lingering in the dark — as many technical images do.
Peter Szendy advances the idea of an ecology of images, driven by an urge to account for their vital powers. For him, images are akin to living organisms, which means they never exist on their own but combine into larger ecosystems.14 To unfold such an ecology is also to push the borders of visual culture beyond the Anthropocene: to see beyond human and human-based temporalities. 
I propose a simpler idea. Before conceiving images as organisms, we should understand their behavior as bodies. I’m advocating for a Newtonian physics of images: a tentative foundation for a new critique of visual culture, one that accounts precisely for the physical power of images...(more)



















artworkfieldwareIan Margo 2025, digital video, color, sound 16:9 4K, 11:00min...(more)