The Office for... Exocapitalism

Exocapitalism marks the next chapter in the story of two researchers who have grown tired with a self-replicating discourse that seems to spiral endlessly only to arrive back where it was. With all the relevant sensibilities and love, discourse on capitalism can feel a bit... Cage-y, dingy, cavernous but poorly lit and damp. Even progressive discourse produces a kind of circle-of-pain—a hamster wheel—which you pour your life into and nothing changes. The psychoanalytical jaguar runs rings rampantly around its walls, not unlike the show-girlies in the motorbike pits of New Mexico or Tong Setan, but it might be less confused if it could understand the concept of glass. It is not unlike the torlauf of a turntable stylus as it tracks its way along the vinyl cliff, only to suddenly clip a scratch and fly out of the groove; as the needle pops into the crevice, it is thrown back into the previous groove, where it will loop-untoward-death like an ox-bow lake.

If this is the task which lies before authors Poliks & Trillo, then Exocapitalism is the first attempt to jog the wheel, or shift the needle, to break out of the loop. As a book it is not a totalizing philosophical work about capital, neither is it a deep excavation of some underlying, string-like particle buried deep within us—and it is absolutely not a fantastical exploration of mind-control aliens extracting our lifeblood. This book is a rigorous attempt to massage the discourse, or to smooth out some contradictions. This work is not theoretically estranged from Marx, Baudrillard or even Land, but it tracks a different path entirely, and attempts to build, from the ground up, new theories and concepts that account for the ever-more-nebulous and chaotic, economic, financial and social phenomena of our multiplicitous Vernetzte Welten.

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Marek Poliks is a researcher in the philosophy of technology, especially with respect to deep learning. He’s based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Marek and his primary research partner Roberto Alonso Trillo (HKBU) have been working to situate deep learning tools as endosymbiotic reproductive infrastructure (inorganic vehicles through which biological, epistemological, and social information is encoded, subject to contingent processes, and transmitted).

Roberto Alonso Trillo is a theorist and artist whose work spans cultural theory, media philosophy, and experimental sound. Based in Hong Kong, his research engages the aesthetic and political dimensions of machine learning, with particular attention to infrastructural critique and performativity. In ongoing collaboration with Marek Poliks, he investigates AI theory and speculative design as part of a broader inquiry into automation and cultural production. His interdisciplinary practice extends into sound art, post-instrumental music, and critical pedagogy.

‘The Office for…’ is a series of artistic and discursive programmes exploring what might be possible if the criteria of ‘contemporary art’ are displaced, temporarily, by alternative frameworks which open up for a multitude of perspectives in one of events such as talks, gatherings, lectures, workshops, screenings, etc. OCA invites people, initiatives, institutions, and organisations that contribute to and inspire expanding the possibilities of thought, knowledge, and action throughout the planet.