Alien Cognition and Edge Detection

Through a tripartite understanding of AI as an instrument (techne), model (concept), and as agent (subject) an exploratory space for refiguring cognition as such, has been forged that undermines exclusively human monopolies on the term and the processes it delineates. This brief talk outlines Katherine Hayles’ Integrated Cognitive Framework as a context to reflect encounters at the thresholds of intelligibility in systemic artworks instantiating estranged relations across diverse substrates. Drawing upon Pierre Huyghe’s Idiom (2024) – an ML driven work that sonifies the development of a machinic language for which humans are silent mobile carriers of said learning system – the technicity of Edge Detection can be extended into the epistemological domain blurring the contours of human self-understanding.