Artificial In/Decision Making and Coded Collectivity

"Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide." Heinz von Foerster, Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics (1991)

Decisions are difficult in many ways: Individuals almost never know all relevant context, and thus have to decide based on incomplete knowledge. Groups need to decide together about things that concern them, and need ways of negotiating diverging interests. Artificial intelligence is often applied to provide expert analyses, in order to find and justify decisions that hopefully seem reasonable.
In this course, we will study communities of creatures, and make computational models of possible ways they make decisions, and the ways they organize their collective activities. Starting from an existing network installation piece* will allow us to proceed quickly to complex experiments.
These studies will inform a larger group project: Creating a complex installation of hypothetical deep sea creatures, inspired by the philosophical/biological fiction "Vampyroteuthis Infernalis" by Vilem Flusser & Louis Bec. While this course focuses on the interactions of such creatures, the individual aspects are being explored in the parallel Hybrid Systems course.