Daniel Weizman

The genesis of cinema was accompanied by a radical philosophical hypothesis: that the industrial automation of the image could achieve what the traditional arts could only simulate. When we consider the essence of the cinematographic image, we find it is defined by automatic movement. Unlike painting, where the mind must "clothe" an immobile figure with motion, or the theater, where movement remains tethered to the physical displacement of a human body, cinema provides movement as an...

When we speak about technology today, we usually ask the wrong kind of question. We ask what technology is : what kind of object it is, what it does to us, whether it is good or bad, human or inhuman. We look for answers in devices, platforms, machines, or systems, as if technics were simply a collection of things that surround us and act upon us. For philosopher Gilbert Simondon, this framing misses the point. Technics is not primarily an object at all. It is a way of making things function...

This short essay approaches AI from a critical perspective, introducing questions that will be developed further in our upcoming course, The Rise of the Machines: Thinking In The Age of AI . The recent fascination with artificial intelligence has revived a long standing philosophical question: what does it mean to think through language? Long before machines began producing fluent texts, psychoanalysis confronted a related and more unsettling problem. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious...