John Modern offers a powerful and original critique of neurology’s pivotal role in religious history. In Neuromatic, religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a sprawling examination of the history of the cognitive revolution and current attempts to locate all that is human in the brain, including spirituality itself. Neuromatic is a wildly original take on the entangled histories of science and religion that lie behind our brain-laden present: from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth century; from cyberneticians, Scientologists, and parapsychologists in the twentieth century to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion. What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the religion it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. In foregrounding the myths, ritual schemes, and cosmic concerns that have accompanied idealizations of neural networks and inquiries into their structure, Neuromatic takes the reader on a dazzling and disturbing ride through the history of our strange subservience to the brain.

"The story Modern tells ranges from eighteenth-century brain anatomies to the MRI; from the spread of phrenological cabinets and mental pieties in the nineteenth century to the discovery of the motor cortex and the emergence of the brain wave as a measurable manifestation of cognition; from cybernetic research into neural networks and artificial intelligence to the founding of brain-centric religious organizations such as Scientology; from the deployments of cognitive paradigms in electric shock treatment to the work of Barbara Brown, a neurofeedback pioneer who promoted the practice of controlling one's own brainwaves in the 1970s. What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the 'religion' it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. Nowhere are science and religion closer than when they try to exclude each other, at their own peril"--

"Kenji Siratori is a madman, for sure, but if you scan his hallucinatory textual mashups in just the right frame of mind, they begin to make sense. And that's the scary part." - Douglas Rushkoff "All the information in the universe, plus several bits from other dimensions that I'm still trying to sort out, have just been mainlined into my nervous system. The shards from a googleplex of infobits seem to be stuck in the part of my brain just above the pineal gland. Yes, I've just been reading Kenji Siratori again. This is my idea of a good time." - RU Sirius "This is the NEW that you never knew was there, and, like all things so totally new, it forces us to rethink our idea of NOVEL, LIFE and, in the end, even ART." - Jared Louche of CHEMLAB

A provocative investigation of the future of photography and human perception in the age of AI. We are constantly photographing and being photographed while feeding machine learning databases with our data, which in turn is used to generate new images. Analyzing the transformation of photography by computation—and the transformation of human perception by algorithmically driven images, from CGI to AI—The Perception Machine investigates what it means for us to live surrounded by image flows and machine eyes. In an astute and engaging argument, Joanna Zylinska brings together media theory and neuroscience in a Vilém Flusser–Paul Virilio remix. Her “perception machine” names a technical universe of images and their infrastructures. But it also refers to a sociopolitical condition resulting from today’s automation of vision, imaging—and imagination. Written by a theorist-practitioner, the book incorporates Zylinska’s own art projects, some of which have been co-created with AI. The photographs, collages, films, and installations available as part of the book (and its companion website) provide a different mode of thinking about our technological futures, at a local as well as a planetary level. Offering provocative concepts such as eco-eco-punk, AUTO-FOTO-KINO, planetary micro-vision, loser images, and sensography, the book outlines an existential philosophy of messy media for a time when our practices of imaging and self-imaging are being radically redesigned. Importantly, it also offers a new vision of our future.

This book constitutes late breaking papers from the 23rd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2021, which was held in July 2021. The conference was planned to take place in Washington DC, USA but had to change to a virtual conference mode due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 5222 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry, and governmental agencies from 81 countries submitted contributions, and 1276 papers and 241 posters were included in the volumes of the proceedings that were published before the start of the conference. Additionally, 174 papers and 146 posters are included in the volumes of the proceedings published after the conference, as “Late Breaking Work” (papers and posters). The contributions thoroughly cover the entire field of HCI, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas.

A sort of new wave hits the post-cyberpunky world, that is the offspring of old-timers initiators. "the nerve cells of the hyperreal HIV=scanner forms gene-dub of the cadaver city to the genomics strategy circuit that compressed the acidHUMANIX infection of her digital=vamp cold-blooded disease animals nightmare-script:: technojunkies' hunting for the grotesque WEB=covered the reptilian=HUB_modem=heart that jointed and the mass of flesh-module in the surrender-site of the cadaver feti=streaming_brain universe murder-protocol rave on the artificial sun outputs to the insanity medium of the human body pill cruel emulator super-genomewarable abolition world-codemaniacs vital browser of a trash sensor drug embryo the murder-gimmick of the soul/gram made of retro-ADAM..."

Algorithms are not to be regarded as a technical structure but as a social phenomenon - they embed themselves, currently still very subtle, into our political and social system. Algorithms shape human behavior on various levels: they influence not only the aesthetic reception of the world but also the well-being and social interaction of their users. They act and intervene in a political and social context. As algorithms influence individual behavior in these social and political situations, their power should be the subject of critical discourse - or even lead to active disobedience and to the need for appropriate tools and methods which can be used to break the algorithmic power.