Like a snake eating its tail, artificial intelligence exists in a circular relationship with its human creators.

Atlas of Anomalous AI maps our complex relationship to intelligence, from ancient to emerging systems of knowledge. A wildly associative constellation of ideas, stories, artworks and historical materials , to approach the defining concepts of AI from an imaginative, artistic and revitalising perspective.

The Atlas presents a hyperdimensional view of the world, through a broad range of perspectives that explore the question of what AI has been and what it is becoming. Key texts on modelling, prediction and automation are brought together with stories of science fiction, dreams and human knowledge, set among visionary and surreal images.

Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas

(see picture at the bottom) The Atlas draws on art historian Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas: A visual archive that Warburg started in 1924. In a series of 63 panels, he showed 971 images comprising photographic reproductions of artworks stretching from Antiquity to the Renaissance, mixed in with newspaper cuttings and advertisements, stamps, images of coins and astrological charts. A sort of Google Search before the internet. Warburg used a card index tracking all references, evolutions and recombinations and had plans for a book edition, but that never happened as he died in 1929.

Contributions from writers, philosophers and curators including: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Ramon Amaro, Noelani Arista, Jorge Luis Borges, Benjamin H. Bratton, Federico Campagna, Arthur C. Clarke, Rana Dasgupta, Eknath Easwaran, GPT-2, GPT-3, Yuk Hui, Nora N. Khan, Suzanne Kite, Jason Edward Lewis, Catherine Malabou, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matteo Pasquinelli, Archer Pechawis, Noah Raford, Nisha Ramayya, Beth Singler and Hito Steyerl.

Artworks by: Anni Albers, Pablo Amaringo, Refik Anadol, William Blake, Ian Cheng, Ithell Colquhoun, DeepDream, Federico Díaz, Susan Hiller, Hildegard of Bingen, Pierre Huyghe, C. G. Jung, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, Paul Laffoley, Lucy Siyao Liu, Branko Petrović and Nikola Bojić, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Casey Reas, Jenna Sutela and Suzanne Treister.

Foreword by Bill Sherman.

About the editors

Ben Vickers is a curator, writer, publisher, technologist and luddite. He is the co-founder of Ignota Books, an initiator of the open-source monastic order unMonastery and the former CTO of Serpentine Galleries in London.

K Allado-McDowell works in the overlap between music, language, technology and healing. They established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI, bringing artists and philosophers into collaboration with machine learning researchers to develop research strategy and policy for emerging AI technology.