Close
Soul Miles is an IAS/SCCI Quirk Creative Fellow from 8 April to 31 July 2025.
Soul Miles is an artist-researcher whose work investigates the compulsory politics of technology; how technology will produce politics, accidentally and inevitably, and how politics will produce technology, accidentally and inevitably, and so on, vice versa, all the way round. Soul is author of And Salt the Earth Behind: Designerly Violence and the Eugenic Archive (2025) and co-author of AI Pedagogies (2023).
The Future Has Never Been More Urgent
Geopolitical agents, non-state actors and capital are arming, organising and speculating - and have been for some time - on a future defined by AI. Meticulously laid plans and desperate gambits all to have stakes and agencies within a space that has not yet been truly realised - and won't be for some time -, a looming promise of ubiquitous intelligence sees us acting stupid. These agents, foetal, latent in ore and stone; where a mile upwards military excursions, invasions, ceasefires, talks, treaties, tariffs, deals... the curtains are drawn the show starts and still the stage-hands are setting up as the performers break their silence.
The black box logic of AI has it that it has been impossible to make eye-contact with these models, they are dark, only visible through their gravity upon objects - we can observe the input and the output of these models but only make inferences as to the nature and the character of the putting. Now, stepping into a world of ever more lurching unintuitive exponentials, artificial agents are the ones tinkering, working on itselves, pulling oneself up by its bootstraps, up and up, out of our reach, and grasp, over our heads. The black box is darker, absolute. We have been speculating towards this, now it is the only way into this. Moving past well-policed and hermetic notions of reproducible and 'good' research practice and towards and into a darkness, only via which we can gather insights.
Creative practice can perform itself as research, but only after the fact, once the doing is done. The residue of this performance may return to us with concrete theoretical insights, but it equally may not, we may stumble instead into novel experiential encounters; modes, models, stories that have been fine-tuned; sensual events, and, of course, so on. We may yet speculate.
