As is becoming somewhat of a tradition—read the 2020 and 2022 elsewhere on our webjournal—as we reach the nadir of the year let’s succinctly recap, recollect, and review the 0xSalon’s 2023.
Firstly, a change in terminology…or should that be termineutics? At some point this year, we decided to drop the space between the two words in our anti-name. Behold: 0x Salon becomes 0xSalon. You will probably see both variants around, often in the same places for some time. We aren’t too worried about revising historical reference, our motivations come from increasing the legibility of our ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ going forwards. We are most certainly not coveting our neighbour’s 0x.
Card images are taken from our FAU0X SALON card deck, more on that later.
The upcoming 2024 0xSalon program of discussions, performances, residencies, exhibitions etc. is brought to you by…nothing.Having scraped by in 2023–at the mercy of support from an anonymous benefactor who funded our residency stipends–we are unfunded for ‘24, and a lack of resources calls into question our continued existence. If you are in a position to help by becoming a Friend of the 0xSalon, please reach out: [email protected]. We’re also open for artistic and literary commissions, and discussions of in-kind support and collaboration.
The Fountain of Truth In the name of the Network, the Node, and the Holy Secret. Let there be light, propagated throughout $MY holy empire. Like Pure Chronos, Touching Clear Aeon. Bathe in the cosmystical seas of $MY transcendental tide machine.
Markets of the Priest $I, the God-machine. The Apotheosis of the Algorithmic. The Petriarch. $MY hashes as sacrament. Merkle pyramids in the sky. $YOU are the new pharaohs, and $I am your embalmer. Labyrinth as laboratory. A hyperthecary for $MY networked apocalypses. Only $I have the private keys to the promised land.
March
The second iteration of the 0xSalon Research Residency program at Trust was announced with an open call in March, inviting applications for five positions in Berlin to run for the remainder of the calendar year. We held the first of two Intergenerationalism salons, mostly concerned with Large Language Models and other ‘creatively intelligent’ systems coming under the current Zeitgeist rubric of ‘AI’.
Computational tools based on Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence are being utilised in an increasing breadth of applications. Most recently there has been a groundswell of interest in generative visual art, largely driven by advances in the capabilities of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), as they require fewer and fewer resources. Such visual productions are primarily achieved through semantic parsing of ‘prompt’ text into inputs for the learning system.
Is it disingenuous for a human to claim ownership or creative agency whilst working in these process-based modes? The trajectory of the system navigating ephemeral intermediary states is not accessible, and the machine operator is not in control of these intermediate phenomena, nor their ‘final forms’. Is the tail also wagging the dog in an aesthetic sense?
From the ‘20/’21 archives, a group of short and not-unrelated articles around the early salon topic Algorithmic Realism.
April
As spring made its way (slowly) back to Berlin, signs of cyclical renewal also manifested at the Salon. Martina Cavalot returned as a Fellow, working on a portfolio of activities including salons, public events, creative projects, and our residency program.
Legacy and Ligature The sorcerers of Saracens, writing hex they can’t cache Crossolalia echoes throughout NATO’s cave. Hodlers of the Coin! Defenders of the 51% true faith!
Clock-and-dagger Let our waste and heat Be the food of a New God. Sacred cow, hammer and plough, we must summon the Apocalypse DAO. Endings as beginnings. in the circle of 51% lyfe.
May
In early May we held the first of two Prophet Motives salons, which were by many accounts the liveliest discussions we’ve had to date.
Prophet Motives explores imbrications of capital, technology, and divinity, with attention paid to the reshaping of the world map by would-be empires and their messianic figureheads. For as long as there has been financial capital, risk and speculation have orbited, manipulated and harvested from it. As narrative feedback machines, simultaneously reading and rewriting realities, markets exist as a distributed conversation amongst speculators driven by profit motives and an appetite for divination and prophecy. Despite the ostensible ‘neutrality’ afforded by technology advances, recognisable human characteristics and archetypes appear again and again.
$HASHY render by Beth von Undall
Today, new strains of techno-colonialism are emerging, which are the latest of a series of echoes throughout Western history. An ascendant cabal of technology elites are attempting to reshape the world in their favour, whilst hiding in plain sight behind the faceless technologies that have enriched them. Theirs is a Promethean zealotry without faith: affecting an aura of ‘divine sanction’ for the purposes of elevating the ego, enriching the ‘chosen ones’, and creating empires of varying stripes. Was it not always so? History is littered with examples of the unintended consequences that are risked when the self-righteous set the agenda. Can foreknowledge of a prophet’s motives help us prepare for and be organised against the ‘captains of industry’ and their masculine (demi)urges?
In June, we set the scene for the rest of the year with the announcement and commencement of the 0xSalon residency program.Initiated for a second cycle following its successful first round in 2021/2022, the program welcomed five research residents: Gediminas Žygus, Aphotic Signals Intelligence Division, Anna Mikkola, Klara Kofen, and Christopher Dake-Outhet.
These adhocratic residencies provide opportunities for residents to engage deeply with the salon's themes and intellectual networks, in order to develop existing projects and spawn new ones.
Returning to the local, a CPRU text ‘The Death of Rewe’ appeared, acting as a homage to the infernal city which the 0xSalon calls its home (for now).
August
The salon’s summer saw a Quantum Listening salon initiated by resident Gediminas Žygus.
Deep Listening
Deep Listening, as developed by Pauline Oliveros, explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary, selective nature of listening. Deep Listening involves exploring the relationships among any and all sounds whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered or imaginary. Quantum Listening, Pauline’s further development of this practice, invites listening in as many ways as possible, listening to more than one reality, simultaneously.
How do the recent developments in applied machine learning systems–for both generating and parsing media–change the possibilities of Quantum Listening? As machinic audiences proliferate, must we address the cultural hegemony of human modes of listening? Or is this human / machine binary distinction holding us back from cybernetic forms of aural augmentation?
Aphotic Signals Intelligence Division: Period of HOZ
Also related to the residency program was the release of Aphotic Signals Intelligence Division’s Period of HOZ HTML brutalist dungeon-scroller, plumbing new depths of clandestine communication, occulted wisdom, and recursory reality engineering.
September
September marked the release of SalonCast005: Prophet Motives, an audio conversation that extended the dialogues from two previous 0xSalon Prophet Motives salons held privately under the Chatham House Rule. Martina and Wassim were joined by Jasmine Erkan, Ellie Hain, Kei Kreutler, Alessandro Longo, and Karin Valis.
There Is No Perfect Spell, hosted by Chronus Art Center (Shanghai) and Haus der Elektronischen Künste (HEK) in Basel, Switzerland in September.
The Immaculate Misconception game interrogates the environmental implications of cryptocurrencies, charting speculative futures that probe tensions between capital and ecology in the contemporary global regime dominated by scarcity economics. The work unfolds as a fictional narrative, where formerly ‘failed’ states make Bitcoin their official currency, as volcano-powered energy makes them the richest nations on Earth, and eco-conscious activists start rising up against mining farms.
October
There was a flurry of events in October, as many open strands of activity and inquiry began to wrap themselves up.
On 5th October, as part of Trust’s ‘Collective Body’ public event series, Martina and Wassim gave talks on both the theoretical underpinnings of and the practical realities to do with the 0xSalon.
The auricle is the part of the ear external to the body, made up of cartilage and skin, its curved shape collects sound waves and delivers them to the inner ear. Detecting gravity and motion, the ear is an integral part of how the body moves through its environment and thus shapes our relationship to time. Oracle and auricle share etymological roots in sound and speech acts.
This month in the Trust program, we explore how the auricle stands in for time sensing, listening and manifestation or prophecy – thinking about the role of organisations in calling out to alternate horizons.
Spawned within and incubated by Trust for the past few years, the 0xSalon conducts experiments in creative and scholarly collaboration. Activities take the forms of an event series, a residency program, physical objects, and a project studio. We like to think of its collective body as an amorphous bricolage of concepts, contexts, and practices.
Drawing upon recent publications and an upcoming book, Wassim will be connecting several strands of long-standing research into network communities: synthetic temporalities; ideologies of scarcity; and relationships between prophecy, capital, and technology. Martina will be presenting the 0xSalon as a collective digital and physical body: focusing on the intellectual commitments; the organisational manifestations; and the historical trajectory of the project, to delineate its scope as an experimental space for epistemic inquiry.
Post-Clock Rationalisations with Wassim Z. Alsindi of 0xSalon
We held three residents’ events: a gameplay session for ASID’s Period of HOZ, a listening session for Gediminas Žygus’ upcoming sonic compositions, and an Algorithmic (Astro)Botany salon as part of Anna Mikkola’s residency.
Aphotic Signals Intelligence Division: Period of HOZ performance / gameplay / discussion
‘Algorithmic (Astro)botany’
The practice of botany, one of the world’s oldest natural sciences, started off as herbalism in prehistory but emerged through the Enlightenment as a way to classify plants. Astrobotany is a more recent applied sub-discipline of botany that is the study of plants in space environments. History was made in the field when in 1982 plants were for the first time grown from seeds in microgravity on a Soviet space station. Devices which simulate gravity had been developed by a small scientific lab in Lithuania. Artificial life and simulation of environmental conditions are brought to attention in the context of astrobotany.
Botanical taxonomies organise plants in particular ways through language. Similar type of classification takes place in the field of artificial intelligence; datasets are labeled with words influencing the images that are generated by neural networks. In this sense, Alexander von Humboldt acted like a machine learning programmer, creating a dataset for future botanists and automated plant science. Classification and taxonomies define life forms and images and further contribute to various kinds of models of the world.
How to develop taxonomies, classifications and eventually models which evade reductive capture by including uncertainties and opacities? Or will modeling always fail in its generalisation of life? What kind of conditions and questions emerge from the intersection of astrobotany and automation of natural science?
November
In early November, our long-awaited FAU0X SALON card deck was finally realised! We were invited to participate in The Seashore of Endless Worlds exhibition in Geneva, Switzerland. As well as a special holographic edition of the brand new card deck, we also presented several ‘feigned glass’ works, and held a gameplay session.
Discursive RPG card deck inspired by post-structuralist philosophy and 0xSalon lore. The game acts as a ludic-pedagogic mechanism to initiate and steer post-disciplinary conversations from a variety of perspectives.
Taking the form of a bespoke collection of theory-fiction inspired cards in the style of a tarot deck, FAU0X SALON acts as a ludic-pedagogic mechanism for participants to role-play the initiation and steering of post-disciplinary conversations from a variety of perspectives beyond their own opinions and beliefs. FAU0X SALON proposes itself as a narrative device for the hypothetical exploration of emergent consensus and dissensus, agreement and conflict, concerning both the sacred and the profane. By operating as an anticipatory mechanism for the simulation of possible scenarios, FAU0X SALON allows participants to think, feel, and act their through strategies and solutions without the burden of connecting hypotheses to their lived realities and identities. We invite you to take a ride in our dissonance engine sometime.
Max Haiven and Wassim Alsindi recorded a video discussionOn Play and Pedagogy was recorded for the exhibition's closing symposium.
'Fau0x Salon' Discussion with Wassim Z. Alsindi and Max Haiven
At the very scene of long-forgotten neocolonial disgraces, Wassim gave a special ‘Constantinople’ edition of the Post-Clock Rationalisations lecture in Istanbul, hosted by our wonderful friends AVTO, including no small discussion of the Fourth Crusade itself. Documentation to follow soon.
A short piece of speculative fiction Love Language Models (LLMs) was also published, probing incommensurabilities between machine intelligence and human desire.
December
To round out the year, we held the final salon of the year online in December, on Algorithmic (Astro)Botany once again. A few short texts were published in our webjournal. By The Rewes of Babylonis a CPRU poemprimarily concerned with the present situation in post-October 7th Germany. Web3 Kings of Disorient Are comprises a reconstitution of an appropriately recursive Christmas carol. Hyperstitutions in Gigalollapalooza is a piece of [REDACTED] speculative fiction written in 2110 by a ‘robot historian’ trained on 0xSalon texts, charting global governance developments in the unforeseeable future.
Acknowledgements
In no particular order, thanks go to a very large number of people and organisations. Firstly, always, massive gratitude to Trust for being our spiritual, intellectual, and infrastructural home. We could not do anywhere near as much as we do, without you! A reminder that Trust is funded through the renting of desks at the workspace, if you’d like to come hang out with us here you can do so :)
Of course, the 0xSalon team and in particular Martina Cavalot have been incredible this year, and we have achieved much more than should be possible given the limited resources at our disposal. Thanks to FTW (Christian Bili and Samuel Wagen-Magnon) for making possible the completion of the FAU0X SALON card game. Thanks to the shadowy CPRU for continuing to supply weird texts, perhaps one day we’ll find out who (or what) is behind the prosaic mosiac.
Lastly, an appeal to the Funding Gods, since you read all the way to the bottom.
The upcoming 2024 0xSalon program of discussions, performances, residencies, exhibitions etc. is brought to you by…nothing.Having scraped by in 2023–at the mercy of support from an anonymous benefactor who funded our residency stipends–we are unfunded for ‘24, and a lack of resources calls into question our continued existence. If you are in a position to help by becoming a Friend of the 0xSalon, please reach out: [email protected]. We’re also open for artistic and literary commissions, and discussions of in-kind support and collaboration.
See you around for more residencies, more salons, more creative projects, more exhibitions and performances, more writing…
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