Sophistication Conference #3

14.-16.11.2019, TU Wien
COPIA AND COPIOUSNESS.
CIRCUITOUS ARTICULATIONS THAT MATTER.

How can we find a novel understanding of human intellectuality in co-existence with artificial intelligence? The Sophistication Conferences are dedicated to a basic kind of literacy in how to think about coding as an “alloy-praxis” that glues letters with numbers,
physics with information, mathematics with language. If the digital has placed us in an era of New Sophistics, we need an up-to-date corresponding discourse on Sophistication. At the core of such a new materialist literacy is a different relationality among
time, nature, subject, and object : Hence our interest is in a »digital gnomonics« that could provide a theoretical framework for addressing computational modelling, machine learning and algorithmic reasoning in a manner that will eventually propel and facilitate
ethics, not moralism.

The Sophistication Conferences are organized once a year at the Technical University Vienna, as a cooperation between the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics ATTP and the laboratory for applied virtuality at the chair for CAAD ETH Zurich, where we invite distinguished as well as young scholars from different fields to think about how such »architectonic intellectuality« affects our relations to the world at large – our institutions, as well as our ordinary daily lives.