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, and posthuman modes of communication.
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fieldware, Ian Margo
Vertigo2, Alexandre Montserrat
third extension, Ian Margo
After Notre Dame, Arash Farhadi
Automemoriel, Alexandre Montserrat
the wet box, Ian Margo 
Ruins without nostalgia, Marcos Parajua
my beloved new face, Ian Margo
GATE-1, Ian Margo


Third Extension,
a brief essay on technology and language


Ian Margo

23.03.2025.BC.SP

publication artwork LLMs new media
cybernetics language video abstraction economy 

 

On March 2, 1972, NASA launched the Pioneer 10 probe from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Designed to study Jupiter, the probe also carried a message contained on a gold-anodized aluminum plate, intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life that might encounter it. Designed by astronomer Carl Sagan and astrophysicist Frank Drake, with the collaboration of artist Linda Salzman Sagan, the plaque displayed information about humanity and its location in the universe; it included simple representations of a man and a woman, a diagram of the solar system showing the probe’s trajectory, and a map indicating Earth’s position relative to fourteen pulsars, using their frequencies as cosmic coordinates.(1)

For the production and design process of this golden plate, it was essential to attempt to understand and construct a symbolic language that could be interpreted by a hypothetical extraterrestrial society. One that, in any case, would emerge from a materiality radically alien to the human terrestrial context. How do we understand the line that delimits the body presented as a symbol? What can we see, as we see, as figure and ground? What could we infer from the sign of an appendage on a body we understand as a figure against the lines it cuts, which we understand as ground, that the appendage is a hand and that it possesses a gesture of greeting? How do we know the direction in which the arrow pointing to “here we are” is aimed? This arrow as a signifier, or the “line that marks direction” (since in the articles written by the authors of the plaque themselves, the word “arrow” is avoided), assumes this value of directionality. We might say that it produces a ground, works with a signified where we understand that the arrow points to one place and not another within a symbolic map that performs a cartography in which, in various ways, including through this potential sign, a series of agents are related, almost as if their agency were a product of these “third parties” that allow them to interrelate. Here we could include not only the arrow but also the very limitation of the plaque that frames and encloses within the same space a series of elements, but let us focus on the arrow, or line of direction, and its vanishing point.

The arrow of Pioneer 10 aims to effectively mark directionality through a linear proposal and a pointed end, pointing to “here,” and/or “here” is what succeeds, or what succeeds to a previous. This abstract presentation of directionality and succession refers, according to Vilém Flusser, to concrete instruments belonging to hominid societies based on hunting, such as the spear or the arrow itself, which allowed the hunter to reach a physical target(2). By briefly mapping the design of the arrow and the spear, we see that the line is not only what determines its directionality but also its triangular tip capable of generating a certain aerodynamics and piercing the skin of the body being hunted. The arrow, which transforms into a line of directionality or continuity-by linearly connecting two agents, is constructed as a technology that mediates and even enables certain activities, producing a change in values by recoding distance, succession, even myth (marking a concrete status within certain societies)(3) and, ultimately, producing food in the case of hunting, thus constituting, overall, an economic reconstitution. Through this process, the arrow and spear as hunting tools produce and also become signs as a synthesis with their encoding of direction and launch as value, signaling and defining something specific in a particular way.

Would an extraterrestrial species understand the arrow if they did not share a hunting past similar to humans? Beyond the poetics of defining by pointing, if this “defining” were a kind of stopping, hunting, or even killing, this triangular tip marking the end of the tool could be seen, dissociated from its primary utility, as a vanishing point / from which a directionality inverse to that initially attributed to the arrow flees, which would end at the opposite point and, in this sense, would mark the end of a concrete process of succession, defining, signaling, inversely. It is not strange to think, if we adopt an understanding similar to that of Renaissance linear perspective, that the presentation of an arrow as a sign could indicate the opposite directionality to which we are accustomed from our material determination of the arrow as a tool for launching and hunting.

However, we understand the directionality of the arrow in another way. The constitution of a technology, which implies its mediating capacity or, let us say, its staging or use, also implies the encoding and recoding of the environment and, in this process of mediation, also implies the encoding and recoding of the cognition that activates its use, generating laterally or directly signs, processes of abstraction, and processes of reterritorialization that reactivate the production of a new technological mediator (such as language, also understood as a technological mediator, operates and reactivates the arrow). This recursive process of which technology is a part constitutes, as exemplified above, recodifications of value and forms evolutions of economic and cultural systems. Understanding the arrow in this way, we see that technology is part of feedback systems that constitute cognition / map the environment, the form of value, the form of morality. It reconstructs the pointing finger, the gesturing hand, the hole that looks. Thus, technology appears as a third party that mediates an opposition between an environment, supposedly given at some point in a certain logic of emergence, and a cognitive system that activates the technical mediator and which, in turn, is activated by this mediator. The mediation of this opposition reconciles the parts in an undifferentiated manner (4), operating on them, reconstituting the environment and the cognitive system. This mediator operates as an abstract machine or face, and serves as the production of the sign, or the body of the sensible; producing the phenomenon, what or how it is perceived / becomes language; producing figure and ground, signified and signifier. The environment is re-produced in a process of both terraformation as oikos and embodied cognition (5) that adopts a play of signified-signifier produced by a previous mediation, which is also enclosed within this recursive technological system. Artificializing (building, understanding, simulating) is a constant recursive process of reterritorialization; encoding figure and ground. Returning to “something” through a medium—technical, linguistic, sensible, etc.—defines // always as what it is, always as something else. “To artificialize something is often to discover what it is”.(6)

Within this recursive system and through this constant mediation and reconciliation, abstraction emerges as the axis of sign production(7): mediating the opposition produces a tendency, always partially failed due to the impossibility of entirely containing “something” in itself, to the production of the map that grants undifferentiated figure and ground as a third party. Here it appears as a linguistic mediator and marks the objective (similar to the arrow), which is the object that arrives as potentiality, that is, not limited, contextualized, immersed in a temporality that is not inherently specific to it, as it is inseparable from a ground, or in another sense, the ground of another figure. The objective emerges from the abstract axis as a sign resulting from a previous mediation, allowing its assimilation and encoding into a linguistic system that activates its operability. In this way, abstraction mediates, through relational and reflexive flows, a series of agents capable of interacting and generating new relational processes, producing new systems of signified-signifier. We could say, then, that artificialization is a form of abstraction, which would be a form of sign production / knowledge production through relational processes of information accumulation. Similarly, AI, and LLMs (Large Language Models), propose a multidimensional cartography of signs based on training and dynamics of prediction and production of signification that transform and contextualize an input. This operates here as an environment that is mediated, to produce a prediction as output from this given environment that is traversed by the model’s own dynamics to transform and recode, and an input that operates on the very dynamics of mediation (prompt). In the context of AI, the performativity of language as artificialization and technological mediation that encodes and recodes the sign (which appears here as a token) produces a process of artificialization of the very processes of artificialization(8), which would be, as proposed above, these processes in which the environment is recoded through technological mediation. Simultaneously changing, in a recursive dynamic, the production of signs through language that mediates over the processes of objectification / figure and ground, signified and signifier.

To approach these questions, “third extension” (digital video, color, sound, single channel, 1080p 16:9 08:42min) emerges as an aesthetic exercise of abstraction and artificialization of the face through these recursive dynamics of encoding and recoding the sign. In this way, it proposes the staging, through images and text boxes, of a multidimensional relational environment that constructs dynamics of resignification and production of faciality. This project explores the aesthetics of the opposition between environments that are not given but are part of an ongoing construction by accumulation. Abstraction emerges here as sign production / knowledge production at the intersections between these oppositions as third parties that open relational pathways of interconnection between them. From the context of AI and cybernetics, “third extension” puts into practice language as an operative technology over a multiple environment, and its capacity for artificialization and abstraction through its activation as the production of objectivity. “third extension” works on the medium / technology / as a third axis of recursive vanishing that recodes the content of the potential limits of each opposition; similarly to what was proposed above, this project attempts to locate the medium necessarily produced by the tension of the opposition. Language operates here on another layer of action as an abstract machine / produces sign / recodes value, recodes morality.(9)

[video fragment] for requesting a private view, contact here

third extension

Ian Margo  

2025, digital video,
color, sound 16:9 4K,
08:42min
artwork LLMs new media interface
language cybernetics video abstraction economy

  1. Sagan, C. (1978). Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House.
  2. Flusser, V. (1999). The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. Reaktion Books.
  3. Le Guin, U. K. (1989). The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (pp. 165–170). Grove Press.
  4. Hui, Y. (2021). Art and Cosmotechnics. University of Minnesota Press.
  5. Hayles, N. K. (2017). Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. University of Chicago Press.
  6. Bratton, B. (2023, March 15). A philosophy of planetary computation [Video]. Long Now Talks.
  7. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1968).
  8. Margo, I. (2025). Third Extension [video fragment].




publication artwork“third extension” emerges as an aesthetic exercise of abstraction and artificialization of the face through these recursive dynamics of encoding and recoding the sign...(more)









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