"In an era obsessed with AI, Automation Culture offers a much-needed reframing of automation as a process that traverses life itself: from DNA to bodily systems and planetary ecologies. Through a series of thought-provoking encounters between art, technology and biology, its contributors reveal both the productive force and the violence of automation, exposing the ways in which life s generative energies are captured and regulated. At the same time, they attend to the frictions through which life continually exceeds its automated scripts, opening up possibilities for thinking and creating otherwise."
-- Joanna Zylinska, Professor of Media Philosophy and Critical Digital Practice, King s College London, UK
"A fascinating and genuinely original collection, Automation Culture gathers an exceptional group of artists and scholars to examine automation at the often-overlooked intersection of art, science, and living systems. Automation Culture provides an important model for future work at the tender meeting point of the humanities, science, and technology."
-- Ari Heinrich, Director of the Gallery at the Australian Centre on China in the World, ANU, Australia
This book develops the notion of automation as being mutually constituted by processes of change and metamorphosis. It seeks to stage and observe this encounter the drive to control, capture, standardise, predict, and determine, set in a generative confrontation with the constant flux of things.
Woven through a series of case studies involving mechanical mouths, petrified wombs, controlled falls, agential neurotechnology, and archival listening, among others, the book posits automation as a mode of questioning that cuts a range of alternative axes through the categories of art, science, and technology.
