Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0
ATEK-639/439 — Fall 2026
Scott Benzel · Labs: Ariel Klevecz · Mondays 1-3:50 A211H
Intro reading Dan McQuillan, from Resisting AI, an Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence
Syllabus
A grin without a cat
Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo
Shoggoth with a Smiley Face
qntm, Yancey Strickler
Degrade the Threads
Aaron French, Kieran Press-Reynolds, Mindy Seu (editor)
Feedback Next
Félix Guattari, Benjamin H. Bratton, Matt Colquhoun
October 12 — No class (Indigenous People’s Day)
05Polybius by Sinneslöschen, Nitro Zeus: Psyop and Rumint
Trevor Paglen, Eric Bonabeau et al.
Visitors: Daniel Small and Matt Sheridan Smith, Thumos
Eliminative Materialism and Neurophilosophy
Donald Hoffman, Natasha Dow Schüll, Cory Doctorow
Police and Thieves
BJ Fogg
Hopeium, a hell of a drug
Satoshi Nakamoto, Diedrich Diederichsen
Machine Decision is Not Final: ‘Humanmade Intelligence’ in China
Anna Greenspan, Bogna Konior, Shuang L. Frost, Daniel T. Baldassarre, Stephen Zepke
Interlocks, Cognitive Hierarchies, Rhizomatics
Hugh Davies, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum
Rewiring Social Structure
Evon Z. Vogt, Geoff Shullenberger, David Roden, Isabel Millar
About
This course examines whether artists employing machine learning, AI, predictive models, and other technics—tools of what Deleuze called “the Societies of Control”—can make art that is evocative, powerful, critical, perhaps even socially transformative.
“Whatever else AI is, it is not neutral, and neither can we be. AI is political because it acts in the world in ways that affect the distribution of power, and its political tendencies are revealed in the ways that it sets up boundaries and separations. The apparatus of AI forms feedback loops with the rest of society: it’s “a structured structure that becomes a structuring structure” (Bourdieu, 1980)”
Dan McQuillan, Resisting AI, an Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence
“…rituals of reversal…“rewire” the crucial connections in the social structure by providing symbolic statements of traditional social imperatives and basic categories of…world view.”
Evon Z. Vogt, Rituals of Reversal as a Means of Rewiring Social Structure