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 Next
Claudia Jacques
Shoggoth with a Smiley Face
qntm, Incogni Research, Yancey Strickler, Scott Benzel
Degrade the Threads
Alex Quicho, Mindy Seu (editor), Aaron French, Scott Benzel
A Pervasive Global Cognitive Automaton
Benjamin H. Bratton, Félix Guattari, Matt Colquhoun, Scott Benzel
October 12 — No class (Indigenous People’s Day)
05Young Slime Life, Swarm v. Slime Dynamics
Eric Bonabeau et al., Ben Woodard
TBD Visitor
Eliminative Materialism and Neurophilosophy
Donald Hoffman, Vincent Le, Cory Doctorow
Police and Thieves
BJ Fogg
Hopeium is a hell of a drug
Satoshi Nakamoto, Diedrich Diederichsen
What’s the Deal with Birds?
Stephen Zepke, Daniel T. Baldassarre
Interlocks, Cognitive Hierarchies, Rhizomatics
Hugh Davies, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum
Rewiring Social Structure / Parasites Lost
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