Disautomatising Technology w/Prof David Bates

Restless Egg Studio welcomes Professor David Bates to Trust, Berlin for a talk examining the emergence of human thinking, neural plasticity and creative worlding practices which are from the start entangled with exteriorized machine technologies and media practices. The talk will highlight moments of “disautomatization" as the conceptual breaks from existing norms that birth new technological and cultural paradigms. Drawing from his recent book, “An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age" (2024), Professor Bates recognises today’s age of intelligent machines as a stage in a longer history of embedding ways of conceiving and applying language, learning and automaticity. Through this recognition we are offered the opportunity to imagine and build beyond dominant conceptions of automation within contemporary technologies. Instead, we ask, what are the latent potentials in technology that may be realised when applying practices of disautomatisation? ——— Doors: 19:30 Talk: 20:00 Discussion and drinks : 21:00 Close: 22:00 ——— Restless Egg​ (RE) is a studio that supports artists, designers and technologists in their goals to further develop their work and ambitions to an institutional scale.​ RE applies a worlding methodology to discover hidden, but existing resources and develops new connections for creative applications and developments of technology. Professor Bates is an intellectual historian at the University of California, Berkeley where he works on questions about technology, politics, and neurology and especially the connections that develop between them in the age of cybernetic systems. restlessegg.com