05/01/2026
Peter Brock
ANTHROPIC
Or, The End of the Myth.
Or, The Invention of Nature.
Or, American Technological Sublime.
Or, The Limited Sphere.
Or, An Ear at the Edge of a Chasm.
Or, The Terminal Lens.
Or, A Mirror at the Command of Our Spasms.
Metaphors domesticate the unknown and defamiliarize the everyday by way of comparison. They are aesthetic gestures that bind together distinct phenomena in a mimetic relationship without actually defining either entity—an interdependency of images. In her book God, Human, Animal, Machine. (2021), Meghan O’Gyblien describes the importance of metaphor in our relationship to technology and the mysteries of consciousness. She argues that the tendency to anthropomorphize large language models is an inversion of Imago Dei— the tenet of Christian theology which asserts that human beings were created in God’s image. These are machines made in the image of human consciousness. She also calls attention to the ways that the language of computation now permeates the discourse around how our minds work (processing, signals, bandwidth, etc). This urge to describe the human brain as a computer coincides with the ongoing efforts to make computers that function like brains…
+ tomorrow, Saturday May 2 ❗️
panel discussion at the gallery. W/ May
The conversation will explore the history of landscape as a pictorial framework for confronting technological change, as well as emerging dynamics of machine vision and the anthropocene.
136 Baxter St New York
