All Tomorrow's Cultures

    The   Statue   of   Liberty   National Monument consists   of   two islands:   Liberty   Island (which hosts the State   of   Liberty ) and Ellis Island, the site   of   the Ellis Island immigration station and an associated hospital complex.   Liberty   Island became a national monument under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ellis Island was included in the site in the 1960s. During its heyday from the late 19th century until its closure in the 1950s, 12 million people were processed on Ellis island, and it is for many the symbol   of   immigration in the United States. The   Statue   of   Liberty   plays a similar role. As Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem, “The New Colossus," proclaims: Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse   of   your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,/I lift my lam...

  One of the many benchmarks for AI is the “Turing test,” Alan Turing’s adaptation of the “imitation game” where an interrogator must decide which of two respondents is a computer. It is, as many have pointed out, a strangely indirect test, one that depends on the credulity of the human interrogator and the capacity of the machine to deceive (Wooldridge 2020). Will they believe the computer? And will the computer be a good enough liar? As Pantsar (2025) comments, “For the machine to pass the test, it needs to impersonate a human successfully enough to fool the interrogator. But this is puzzling in the wide context of intelligence ascriptions. Why would intelligence be connected to a form of deception?”   On the one hand, measuring AI through its deceptive power has the benefit of avoiding the idiocy of attempting to establish a measure of intelligence, a task deeply imbricated in racial eugenics (Bender and Hanna 2025; Wooldridge 2020). On the other, generative AI applicat...

  As anthropologists work with collaborators in evoking alternatives to capitalist fascisms, they increasingly engage multimodal registers; games, design, graphic novels and soundscapes join film and text in innovative work that seeks to ground worlding in sensorial engagement and haptic experience. Here, the multimodal can support the emancipatory politics of communities where anthropologists work. But what of the politics of multimodal? Is there anything inherently emancipatory in the engagement with diverse platforms? In order to problematize the multimodal, this paper explores another moment in multimodal evocations of alternative futures–Spiritualism in the late 19th century. While “spirit rapping” may have been the first volley in the explosion of Spiritualist practice, the movement soon incorporated writing, drawing, sounds, photographs and multiple objects into its evocations of a “Beautiful Beyond” that represented not only the afterlife, but the utopian...

Matt Durington and I had a wonderful time giving a talk at UBC Okanagan. Thanks to Dr. Fiona McDonald and the Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography Lab.    Multimodal interrogations video link  

 

An article in the Baltimore Banner by Rona Kobell ( https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/local-news/hampton-national-historic-site-east-towson-URF5WGM5TZCAZMJAZBGRU7JYMY/ ) reminded me about the precarious state of knowledge under an authoritarian regime. Will our report on Hampton National Historic Site disappear from the National Park Service site? In all probability, yes - we are, after all, calling out the enslavement and racism that built the United States. I contributed a chapter on the echoes of that enslavement in the formation of contemporary Baltimore County. So, for now, here's the report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17RT9t1iewAvNxYgjaWV2tStaoNLgcxgT/view?usp=sharing    

      CFP: AAA 2025   13 Ghosts of Multimodality: Critiquing, Rejecting and Learning to Live with Multimodality’s Problems Panel Organizer: Samuel Collins (scollins@towson.edu)   (Still from "The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo" (1985)) William Castle was the director and producer of countless horror movies, many of which utilized various “gimmicks”--seats wired to deliver electrical shocks, puppets that appeared from behind the movie screen, props of all kinds. His film “13 Ghosts” (1960) was no exception: the movie recounts the efforts of a family to spend the night in a haunted house and the audience was given special glasses to see the ghosts or make them disappear, an effect (“Illiusion-O”) that critics found a distraction and that did not last into the re-making of the film in 2001. Indeed, many of Castle’s tricks didn’t work as intended: too much voltage to the seats, puppets that people would throw their popcorn at, props that ran far...

 I continue to wrestle with the legacy of cybernetics in anthropology - and a future premised on an anthropological bases for the digital.  https://histanthro.org/notes/communication-without-control-macy-conferences/

  What are faculty thinking about generative AI? In my role at our faculty center , I speak to faculty often on the problems they face teaching in the era of AI, and the workarounds they've come up with. The advent of publicly available generative AI platforms was not something people in my field (anthropology) or other faculty in the social sciences and humanities were clamoring for. And yet here we are. This has led to many responses: anguish, certainly, but also ways of incorporating--or at east channeling--the usage of generative AI in the classroom. But what about faculty outside of my university? I used NodeXL to download Reddit data from the "/Professors" subreddit using the keyword "AI." This generated records of about 2500 users posting, commenting or replying for a total of 7000 contributions to the debate. I then grouped the data in clusters of similar postings, and abstracted the top words from each group as indicated by "up-vote" (which fu...