Online event on Masked Media: 12 September, 2015
Monday, September 1, 2025 at 11:32AM 
Above are details of an upcoming online 12 September event on my new book Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence (London: Open Humanities Press, 2025):
Co-organised by Culture Machine and 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos in Mexico city, the event is hosted by the Laboratory of Contemporary Writings / Laboratorio de Escrituras Contemporáneas, which is being launching with this discussion of Masked Media.
The idea for the Laboratory of Contemporary Writings emerged from a recent ACLA Seminar titled ‘Displacing Academic Practices in the Ruins of the Neoliberal University’. While linked to conversations around infrapolitics (e.g., https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/), its focus is broader: on writing, subjectivity, students, ourselves, and how to respond to the conditions we’re living through today.
To join this event online, email: enlace@17edu.org
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On Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence
If we want a more socially and environmentally just future, do we need a radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory?
It’s this question that Gary Hall and his collaborators have been addressing for over twenty years with experimental publishing projects such as Open Humanities Press, Liquid and Living Books, Radical Open Access Collective, and the Culture-led Re-Commoning of Cities. Unsettling received ideas of the author and book, originality and copyright, real and artificial intelligence, these uncommon communities of theorist-mediums have been testing some of the ‘non-modernist-liberal’ modes of creating and sharing knowledge that are enabled by various media technologies, from writing and print through photography and video to computers and GenAI. By thinking outside the masked black box that renders the anthropocentric, Euro-Western knowledge-making practices of the arts and humanities invisible – ensuring the human is kept ontologically separate from the nonhuman, be it animals, the planet or algorithmic machines – they show there’s no such thing as the human, the nonhuman already being in(the)human.
Masked Media is one such experimental project. It is not a 'human-authored' work. Instead, the thinking within it has been generated by a radically relational inhuman assemblage that includes AI and more. Although the book appears under a real name – ‘Gary Hall’ – which, like Banksy and Karen Eliot, acts as a mask, it is not the intellectual property of a singular human individual, and is published under a Collective Conditions for Re-Use licence to reflect this. Masked Media demonstrates how such norm-critical experimentation is of vital importance to our understanding of everything from identity politics and the decolonialisation of knowledge, through epistemologies of the Global South and the possibilities of open city infrastructure, to extractive capitalism, planetary destruction and the Anthropocene.