Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.
A few months ago I connected with Joaquin Melara, a US-based tech community builder. Joaquin has been very busy developing SWARM, a collective of fascinating folx from all walks of life, working towards the responsible adoption of AI technology. As well as some great events and seminars, SWARM also produces The AI Digest Podcast, and I was thrilled to be invited to join Joaquin to talk about my glitchy AI work.
A little while ago, I spoke with machine learning engineer and responsible AI expert Bogdana Rakova about my approach to generative AI education and research: embracing the weird, messy, and broken aspects of these technologies rather than trying to optimise them.
This conversation was part of Bogdana’s expert interview series on ‘Speculative F(r)iction in AI Use and Governance,’ examining form, function, fiction, and friction in AI systems.
We discussed my classroom experiments mixing origami with code, the ‘Fellowship of Tiny Minds’ AI pedagogy project, and why I deliberately push AI systems to their breaking points. The conversation explores how glitches and so-called ‘hallucinations’ can reveal deeper truths about how these systems work, and why we need more playful, hands-on approaches to AI literacy.
The piece connects to my ongoing research into everyday AI: examining glitch as a tactic of resistance, the time-looped recursive futures of the Slopocene, and experimental methods for rethinking creativity, labour, and literacy in an era of machine assistants.
Read the full chat at this link, and share your creative responses on the page if you’re moved to!
In the chaos of 2020 I didn’t post this, but here’s a chat I had with the lovely James from Intellect Books. Mostly we chat about war and cinema (my first book The Hollywood War Film was published by Intellect in 2017), but there’s a small nod at the end of the conversation to Material Media-Making.
We also spent a little time talking about publishing your first book, writing the proposal etc.