The Magikarp Lecture

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This lecture uses Magikarp as a conceptual device to trace how agency, value, and authorship emerge within distributed systems. Moving from Twitch Plays Pokémon to contemporary debates around AI-generated content, it argues that so-called “AI slop” reveals a longer history of collectively produced, uneven cultural output whose conditions have only recently become visible at scale. By following Magikarp’s improbable evolution through borrowed effort, the lecture reframes generative AI as an assemblage of infrastructures, datasets, and labour relations rather than a singular creative agent. It critiques dominant discourses that fixate on aesthetic output while leaving underlying power structures intact, including platform ownership, annotation labour, and energy-intensive computation. Foregrounding distributed agency as both a technical and cultural logic, the talk proposes that the controversy around AI-generated content functions as a spectacle that obscures material conditions. The ecological and labour dimensions of AI systems emerge as the central terrain of critique, revealing how extraction operates across data, bodies, and environments. Rather than marking a rupture, AI exposes the statistical condition of culture itself: a field of accumulation, repetition, and transformation in which meaning crystallises through collective participation.

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Ludic Soirée: Bearing the UnBearable

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