On the sixth or seven minute of the opening speech Marica from the Waseda delegation tilts her chin towards the bottom-left corner of her screen and adjusts her collar mike. I note that in a column I am keeping on a scratchpad besides my keyboard, where I have written down each of the participants' ethnicities and names. On the screen someone is pontificating about the mobility of AI ethics in an age of multicellular distance and I am writing down people's ethnicities and names on a piece of paper. When Marica tilts her chin again I put another tally mark by her row.
The conference lasts for three days and is held entirely over Zoom. I become fast friends with a Dave from ASU, who lectures on the sophist revival and the self in 1st-century Athens, but is really working on a paper linking the mutable consistency of text strings in GANs to reincarnation in Arthur Berridale Keith's translation of the Black Yajus Veda. "If you'll pardon the recursion, the recurrence of things itself recurs numerous times in the text, though the Scotsman takes great pains to disguise each occurence as if it is happening to the reader for the very first time." His voice is eloquent, grinding, rasping: the compression algorithm struggling to scrape his voice from the cicadas in the Arizona heat. From the corner of my eye, I see the number of people in the breakout group decrease to two.
Nobody can quite agree on a common definition of criticality as it applies to automated catalogue descriptions of computer-generated art. A whisper in my chat window blossoms into full-fledged electronic paranoia. Marica from Waseda confides in me that she doesn't have much faith in comparmentalisation, that Japanese theorists tend to trust instead in flow. She's typing to me in the chat box when I see both hands move up to adjust her collar mike. A spooky event only if we do not accept the internet for what it is, a physical thing, an asynchronous object brought to us through a series of segmented, trembling waves. On her screen, her hair flickers in the digital breeze.
My lecture is about the analogue biohacking of facial recognition. Close-ups of my dilated pupils fill participants' shared screens. The black twitching globes dilate and react to the flickering of a hundred million GAN-generated faces I have set to greet me in the morning when I turn on my computer. This is followed by a video of real faces talking as provided to seasoned employees of Amazon's Mechanical Turk programme. Over the days I track how my saccadic reflexes have become overloaded, sluggish, prone to overtracking things. A neurologist in the audience raises a brown emoji hand and asks me how I can tell if he himself is real, and I laugh and put a tally by his name.
"It's the sheer ubiquity of it, the fact that we can't even occasionally pull away from it, that makes the great distress of our consciousness what it is," coughs Theodore from UWA. It's midnight where he is and the ambient darkness is messing with his virtual background, cropping out bits of his face, his hair, as if his computer can't decide if he is to be present or not. "If I were to explain it to my undergrads, which I do all the time, it'd be the reductive issue of how we are to live with each other, which sidesteps the central conceit of it all." We exchange field notes afterwards and I read about the prevalence of falsified bad actors in electronic naval warfare, replete with artifacted admirals and their pixellated talking heads.
The discussion on criticality reaches an impasse. Lost in the forests of proof and definition, nobody sees Marica from Waseda slip out of her seat and fall to the floor. For a moment I don't notice either, scanning from face to digital face animatedly jostling in their seats, watching the composite of their forms bubble up and again against the black digital sea. They're speaking in one voice, I realise, because the audio compositor can't keep up. The cicadas are screaming in my very own room. When Marica from Waseda's back in her seat and adjusting her microphone again, apologising for nothing, I note that she's performed the exact same action a total of 587 times.