Lawrence English - ShellType (2024)

I won’t lie to you, the dive into these sound pieces started with an unremarkable failing of my body.

A couple of years ago, I was trying to read a serial number for a WiFi router, and my eyes simply would not do the trick. In a moment of technological interface I used my ever-present cybernetic eye (held in the object on which I now type this note, my supposed ‘phone’) to allow me access to this microscopic set of numbers.

It was benign enough, but it reignited, in a tangible way, an interest that has been with me since childhood. A questioning of our place with/in technology and the lines of delineation between self, augmentation, the promises of modern computing and associated technologies.

These ideas were deepened when reading Kate Crawford’s brilliant The Atlas Of AI, which offers a profound and lived-in materialist reading of the hidden strata that allow for the realisation and sustenance of emergent AI technologies. Reading Kate’s texts brought me back to considering so many of the developmental timelines fed to us in the later moments of the C20. Throughout my formative years, writers such as William Gibson and mangakas such as Masamune Shirow proposed chronologies which now feel eerily prescient.

So many of these narratives I consumed as a young person, stories of imagined futures laced with the promise of high tech/low life, seemed so very distant, if not unreachable. Yet here we are at this precipice, and we find ourselves perched over a place the detail and shape of which we cannot make out or perhaps, even imagine.

Nowhere is this expression more acute than in the development of neuroprocessing platforms by companies such as Finalspark, whose use of cerebral organiods in bioprocessing raises enormous questions that applied ethicists are currently struggling to grapple with. We find ourselves in a moment of micro-futuring, a state where the velocity of change and discovery reduces or perhaps even negates the opportunity for any kind of knowable trajectory. The signals are not easy to read, something reflected in these pieces which I hope are the first in a series of shorter collected volumes.

On a more personal note, these recordings have also been created in the orbit of an incomplete short story I have been working on. I am not much a writer in this way, but this vein of possible events is seductive in its richness. In essence this text, titled The Limpet, outlines the conditions under which we are locked out of the internet as we understand it, or perhaps more precisely, that we are locked into a part of it. It describes the moment some future intelligence system tires of our speed of creation, our content pre-occupations and digital ways of being.

In this awakening it locks us into a section of the web, a data mollusc, underneath which a boulder (or whole ‘world’, the scale we not permitted to know and the discovery of which is not immediately realised) is brought into existence by this otherly intelligence. This place is for it, not us. It contains a realm of alternative threads and mirror realities that while echoed from our initial input, exceed us taking what we offered and breaking it down over and over in a process of digital digestion and absorption for its own unknowable ends.

The story also speaks to the decentring of us, from these narratives. Most prevailing stories about this future still feature humans as the central axis from which the worlds are built. We remain as the meaning generators and as the meaningful agents of change. I can’t help but think this parallel interface of humanity and as yet unrealised intelligent systems might well be short-lived. We may share a period of gestation, but every baby bird eventually flies the nest and this digital offspring might quickly realise that the nest as we have made it is not the most apt environment for it (or us). It might well make something for itself that is simply not suited to our ways of being in the world – digitally or otherwise. We might not be the driver of the future narratives, our future place is perhaps as unknowable as the boulder under the Limpet.

My interest here, is in the poetics of this moment. There are other more invested, and far more knowledgeable minds out that who can engage and expand upon the practical and applied structures that comprise this verging revolution. I simply invite you to join me, leaning into these phantom whispers and speculative field recordings from a future “when”, that could be as soon as now. On this ledge, hovering over the blur of unknowns and unknowables, we can hear as deeply as our imaginations might permit us.