Future Now Making the Machines of Tomorrow - Nick Land (1)

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Hi everybody, very good to see everybody here of course. Five minutes, 300 seconds, obviously nowhere near enough time. Easy answer, print some. Listening to what's going on here, that's not so hard. We've got organ printing already, crank it forward a bit, do some brain printing, mash them all together into…

• 00:01:56

  I think it's one of the questions that we have to address in this question about now and the future. So I'll start by saying thanks. Thank you so much for your inspiring provocations. I just wanted to start with a really big question which I think relates to all of our projects in the room, which is the extent…

• 00:02:51

  Which is that the more you find out about something, the more you learn about something, That's very odd, I think, for people. The modern mind tends to think the more you learn about something, the more you understand it, the more real it seems, the more credible it seems, the more solid it seems. But this…

• 00:04:16

  If you take a look at the original story, don't think that, if you stop thinking about it, that is in some sense disrupted or fractured, then you begin to wonder really where things are coming from, when they happened, and what is in fact taking place. Okay, I'm going to try to throw something else out, which…

• 00:05:42

  When you think about your own work and how the future plays, if you can think about this mixture of terror and fear and also seduction and desire. There's a particular dimension of horror that I think people will identify with quite strongly, and I think has a lot of content to it. It's quite fascinating. And an easy…

• 00:07:29

  You know, it's like, it's distributed over enough time, it's easy enough to push it into different compartments that people don't quite see it. But the notion of a whole bunch of things coming together without agents, without people controlling it, without any recognisable goals or objectives, and actually coming…

• 00:08:04

  And I think the example, which probably people will recognise from the movies, is that moment, in the second Terminator movie, when there's an almost indestructible, liquid metal robot trying to kill and chase and kill people, they release some liquid hydrogen or some extremely cold thing and freeze it, and then smash…

• 00:09:08

  It's just a very small, very small, very small, and it's just happening over a timescale and in a distributed way that you're not recognising it over that same vivid shock. And it seems to me this kind of technology and the kind of things that go on here very much have that actually going on under the surface…