[I]f the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
—Vernor Vinge

With the advent of ChatGPT-4, discussions surrounding the possibility of AGI——artificial general intelligence possessing the ability to perform tasks at the same level as humans——are resurfacing in academia. For instance, Cornell University’s recent study, Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence, considers how experiments conducted with GPT-4 are indicative of a practical and theoretical basis upon which such intelligence might arise. The possibility of AGI is integrated with that of The Singularity—a hypothetical event wherein humanity is unable to reverse, or even control, the growth of AI as such—an event which will have radical implications on aspects of humanity we merely take for granted. This workshop, held at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University, will convene scholars and artists to discuss the implications of AGI, The Singularity, and notions of accelerationism in theory, politics, and the arts.

As traditional modes of rigorously transcendental thought rear their heads, an “opaque wall across the future,” à la Vernor Vinge, has stymied previous attempts to think beyond the human. That being said, the resurgence of speculative philosophy following Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude (2008) has prompted renewed attempts to stretch the human to its epistemological breaking point. Responses to Meillassoux’s problem of how to escape the ‘Kantian correlate of thinking and Being’ include turns to mathematics (Meillassoux and Badiou), fiction(ing) and future building (in post-CCRU theorists and SF authors), aesthetic and poetic subjective dis-solution (Ireland and Siratori), and a commitment and re-affirmation of philosophical realism (Harman and DeLanda), to name but a few examples. Philosophy once again has the theoretical tools necessary to think the irreversibly changing and distorting human subject——a subject intimately tied to rapid (and perhaps uncontrollable) technological advances.

It is in the vein of the aforementioned thinkers and modes of thought that the Hyperstitional Research Syndicate (HRS) presents Accelerated Ad(E)vent: Subjectivity and Aesthetics Approaching the Singularity, a two-day event from the 24^th–25^th of May 2024 to address the following questions: 1) how does the approaching Singularity alter ideas of subjectivity?; 2) how does one come to terms with the aesthetics of a technologically dominated future?

The aim of this workshop is to bring together thinkers working in fields as diverse as philosophy, comparative literature and science fiction studies, musicology, affect studies, and graphic design (for example)——thinkers who are simultaneously of the future yet situated in the present——to look at current technological trajectories and future histories, extrapolating them as far as possible. By drawing out and expanding upon tendencies in the present——and in turn, using the results to problematize questions of subjectivity and aesthetics——we hope to begin to ‘make sense’ of a future that is almost unthinkable.

Read the book below!