Crystal Palace / Neilson Koerner-Safrata

A century after automotive industrialization, the car is now centred in another industrial shift, a vehicle for autonomous machine intelligence. The new computational Fordism of smartness, simulation, and deep learning promises to create the cognitive and sensorial capacities of a driving agent. If the car was the agent that was able to redefine our relationships to industry, energy, and the built environment, etc., then as the silicon chip eats the car, will these relationships not be rebuilt once over in this image? The manufacture of self-driving vehicles, a combined governmental and computational task, will disclose how humans and autonomous machine agencies do or do not coexist within the policies of computational Fordism. An automobile is already a cognitive device, or at least a computational one. As ongoing chip shortages completely halt car production, and while petrol shocks come and go, lithium and silicon are now two key ingredients in operating automobiles. When the cognitive capacities to drive are eventually developed, would this new autocene not also coincide with the creation of the noocene, an explosion of autonomous agents? Who or what a car is, and the distributed effects of this uncovering, are broached in a speculative way between intelligences and automotives, when do cars begin to think, and what do we think of cars. 

Bio: Neilson Koerner-Safrata is a video game designer, along with his twin brother Milan, he runs the interactive studios SCRNPRNT and Engine, building upon the modern infrastructures of play and game engines. His work has been exhibited at Now Play This, A MAZE, Vancouver International Film Festival, Independent Games Festival, IndieCade, and Ludicious.