[Commlist] Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence: new book

Together with Open Humanities Press,Joanna Zylinska is pleased to 
announce the publication of /Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in 
the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence/by Gary Hall in my MEDIA : 
ART : WRITE : NOW series.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, /Masked Media /is available open 
access (= it can be downloaded for free):

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/
**

*Book description*

If we want a socially and environmentally just future, do we need a 
radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory? It’s this 
question Gary Hall and his collaborators have been addressing for over 
twenty years with experimental publishing projects such as Open 
Humanities Press, Liquid and Living Books, and the Culture-Led 
Re-Commoning of Cities. Unsettling received ideas of the author and the 
book, originality and copyright, real and artificial intelligence, these 
uncommon communities of theorist-mediums are testing the 
‘non-modernist-liberal’ modes of creating and sharing knowledge enabled 
by various media technologies, from writing and print, through 
photography and video, to computers and GenAI. By thinking outside the 
masked black box that renders Euro-Western knowledge-making practices 
invisible – keeping the human ontologically separate from the nonhuman, 
be it animals, the planet or algorithmic machines – they show there’s no 
such thing as the human, the nonhuman already being in(the)human.

/Masked Media/ is one such experimental project. It is not a 
‘human-authored’ work. Instead, the thinking within it has been 
generated by a radically relational assemblage that includes AI and 
more. Although the book appears under a real name – ‘Gary Hall’ – which, 
like Banksy and Karen Eliot, acts as a mask, it is not the intellectual 
property of a singular human individual, and is published under a 
Collective Conditions for Re-Use licence to reflect this. /Masked 
Media/ shows how such norm-critical experimentation is of vital 
importance to our understanding of everything, from identity politics 
and the decolonisation of knowledge, through epistemologies of the 
Global South and the possibilities of open city infrastructure, to 
extractive capitalism, planetary destruction and the Anthropocene. It 
thus constitutes a call to radically redesign theory for a time of 
multiple crises.

In /Masked Media/, a follow-up to /A Stubborn Fury/, Hall proceeds to 
show how our ways of writing and working can be reinvented to produce a 
more socially just future after the years of austerity and the 
coronavirus pandemic.

**

*Author bio*

Gary Hall is an experimental critical theorist working at the 
intersection of digital culture, politics and technology. He is 
Professor of Media at Coventry University, UK, where he served as 
founding director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures from 2017 to 
2025. He is the author of a number of books, including /A Stubborn 
Fury/ (Open Humanities Press, 2021), /Pirate Philosophy/ (MIT Press, 
2016) and /The Uberfication of the University/ (University of Minnesota 
Press, 2016).

Like all Open Humanities Press books, /Masked Media/ is available open 
access (and can be downloaded for free):

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/ 
<https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/drone-aesthetics/>



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