POST-HUMAN CO-CREATION

I use writing to explore non-human creativity
and the evolution of identity in the 21st century.

My debut book, Pharmako-AI, was the first written
with a modern LLM, GPT-3, and is recognized as a landmark in computational literature.

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13

Books

  • Out Side

    Out Side (Graphic Novel)

    A young painter named Stone searches for her lost muse and parrot, Petey. Fresh out of art school, Stone stumbles through a daunting world of commercial art and technocapitalism. Along the way she uncovers a terrifying conpiracy that stretches to the very roots of reality.

    Out Side embraces the constraints and possibilities of AI art. Faces, hands, and landscapes appear in their raw hallucinated state, forcing us to wonder: in what dimension do the characters live? Why do space and time bend around them? Is this ambiguity unique or an esential quality of all storytelling?

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  • Air Age Blueprint

    A filmmaker’s life is disrupted by a fated encounter with a Peruvian healer. Called to twin paths of artistic creation and mystic truth-seeking, they set out on a transcontinental journey. In the Pacific Northwest they meet K, a double agent working between art and technology, who invites them to test a secret program called Shaman.AI. This human-machine experiment, rooted in magic, produces a key to rewriting reality – a manifesto describing how entangled human and non-human intelligence will remake our technologies, identities and deepest beliefs.

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  • Amor Cringe

    Amor Cringe explores the dually base and beautiful aspects of self-obsessed media culture. In a perennial bohemian style, an unnamed, ungendered protagonist travels from coast to coast and affair to affair, stumbling upon various moments of failure, absurd insight, and flashes of transcendence. Excerpt

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  • Pharmako-AI

    The first book to be co-created with the AI language model GPT-3, Pharmako-AI is a hallucinatory journey into selfhood, ecology and intelligence via cyberpunk, ancestry and biosemiotics. Through a writing process akin to musical improvisation, Allado-McDowell and GPT-3 together offer a fractal poetics of AI and a glimpse into the future of literature.

    Excerpts: Hyperspatial Art, The Poison Path

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Essays

  • Neural Interpellation

    A taxonomy and history of media types beginnig with broadcast media and including a new category called “neural media”.

    Commissioned by Gropius Bau

    Read

  • Designing Neural Media

    How will deep entanglement with neural networks shape our future selves – and who gets to write the script?

    Commissioned by Gropius Bau

    Read

  • Play with AI

    “The acclaimed writer and founder of Google’s Artists + Machine Intelligence program asks: What if we imagined a healing AI?”

    Commissioned by MoMA

    Read

  • Side FX

    “On the proliferation of images generated by machine-learning models and what they mean for the future of art”

    For Ursula magazine

    Read

  • Imagination Against the Horrible Brood

    Is Al the "horrible brood of beings" prophesied by Rudolf Steiner?

    For Spike Art

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  • Notes on CRINGE

    Notes on Cringe accompanied the release of Amor Cringe on the Deluge blog.

    Read

Anthologies

  • Interspecies Future: A Primer

    Co-edited with Julia Kagansky and Corinne Mynatt

    What comes after the Anthropocene? Can we depart from our human-centered perspective to build a future for the benefit of all species? What tools and techniques might help us get there? These are the questions investigated by the long-term interdisciplinary project Interspecies Future, which brings together perspectives from art, science, and technology to explore what this future might look like. First initiated in 2022 by LAS Art Foundation, this project explores new pathways for planetary thinking and collective intelligence. With more than 60 contributions, this interactive reader is the first book to provide an extensive foundation of key concepts, debates, and case studies that propose ways to re-frame, repair, and re-imagine interspecies relations. Interspecies Future: A Primer draws on recent advancements in planetary computation and machine learning, new discoveries in non-human intelligence, as well as post-human theory and Indigenous knowledge.

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  • VITA NOVA

    Fiction/essay

    The Vita Nova editorial project had its genesis in the Fórum do Futuro: a programme of debates, artist talks, and performances, held annually in the city of Porto, that brings together guests from different artistic and scientific practices to reflect on fundamental issues for contemporary societies. The Fórum do Futuro presented a book that proposes to question human and non-human existence in the current social context, spanning different cosmogonic views.

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  • Atlas of Anomalous AI

    Co-edited with Ben Vickers

    Atlas of Anomalous AI is a compelling and surprising map of our complex relationship to intelligence, from ancient to emerging systems of knowledge. A wildly associative constellation of ideas, stories, artworks and historical materials, the Atlas draws on art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas — an image map of the “afterlife of antiquity” — to approach the defining concepts of AI from an imaginative, artistic and revitalising perspective.

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  • Chimeras

    Excerpt from Pharmako-AI

    Chimeras attempts to disassemble and reformulate what one might understand as AI by taking apart both notions of ‘artificiality’ and ‘intelligence’ and seeing what new meaning they produce when recombined.

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  • HOLO 3: MIRROR STAGE

    Essay

    Guest editor Nora N. Khan and fifteen luminaries question our problematic faith in and deference to AI. Exploring the limits of knowledge, prediction, language, and abstraction in computation, their collected essays and artworks measure the gap between machine learning hypotheticals and the mess of lived experience.

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SHORT FICTION

  • The Depression Artist

    For Mousse Magazine

    Read

  • Deepfake Autofiction

    For Knight Foundation’s ShiftSpace

    Read

Praise for Air Age Blueprint

‘Air Age Blueprint inaugurates a new stage in twenty-first century AI writing. K Allado-McDowell’s book has come into being through a collaboration between different forms of intelligence and its story presents a continuation of its own making – a coming together of different forms of existence and thought.’

– Hans Ulrich Obrist

‘Air Age Blueprint elegantly weaves immigrant family histories, native entheogenic cultures, and cybernetic manifestos of social revolution into a collaborative human-machine writing adventure. It certainly opens a portal to a de-anthropocentric narrative of the future. An unquestionable tour-de-force.’

– Chen Qiufan, author of The Waste Tide and AI2041:Ten Visions for Our Future

 

‘Air Age Blueprint is a visionary book, a map of cognitive experiments, amplifying possibilities for otherness to manifest, contaminating self and belief, and rewriting transformational roads. Co-writers K Allado-McDowell and their AI companion have hallucinated an animistic techne, a spirit pollinator, a portal for human and non-human to correspond beyond their self-centred worlds.’

– Pierre Huyghe

 

‘At once futuristic and suspended in time, Air Age Blueprint is a rich meditation, remarkable field manual and work of techno-sorcery for our Aquarian times. Existing in the last gasps of our failing contemporaneity, we are presented with a portrait of a poet and seeker looking into the scrying mirror of an AI companion. Through this journey, we reemerge as readers: transformed, shaky, hallucinating and left wondering – who is the mirror and who is the object? Air Age Blueprint is the magical work I didn’t know I needed to read.’

– Xiaowei Wang, author of Blockchain Chicken Farm

 

‘Air Age Blueprint is a work of healing/mourning for the subculture – punk and DADA and new narrative and rave and noise and theory and technognosis – that kept us alive and worlded until late capitalism got too late even for us. What can we do when even our most frantic, psychedelic maps are stretched so thin? K Allado-McDowell summons a billion-dollar engine for constructing worldviews from raw language-matter – GPT-3, crowning jewel of modern techno-capital, great mystery of modern science – to dream new life-worlds from these fragments shored against our ruins.’

– Peli Grietzer

 

‘K Allado-McDowell’s Air Age Blueprint is a technoerotic mystery tale, with pagan sacraments and data-veins of living blood. In their journey onwards from intimate, raw childhood pain inflicted by a priest, they encounter intelligences both artificial and organic. The narrative races through text generated by AI alongside the author’s poetic voice. They map their pilgrimage where worlds disappear into other worlds, shapes shift, and the invisible coexists with the visible. Their encounters with an Amazonian healer are the most powerful and honest I have read. The Air Age is the next historical age, replacing and healing the ecological destruction wrought by the Anthropocene. This personal memoir/ontological map/philosophical treatise aims to reconcile language and silence, kundalini and the NSA, lithium springs and coffee, floral stigmas and human stigmas, exorcism and absolution, anarchy and control, ancestors and potentialities, magic and method.’

– Kathelin Gray, writer, producer, curator. Founder of Theatre of All Possibilities, Institute of Ecotechnics, Biosphere 2

 

‘K Allado-McDowell draws you deeply into the sacred and cosmic jungle of the creative spirit. Intimately biographical and kaleidoscopic in form, Air Age Blueprint uses prescient storytelling to explore the future of plant medicine in a world that is one part human and one part machine. The book masterfully weaves AI-generated text with Allado-McDowell’s poeticism, dissolving binaries into a page-turning meditation that could not be more timely. As the emerging Psychedelic Renaissance unfolds in the West, Air Age Blueprint offers a set and setting for human and non-human alike to integrate the trauma of alienation in ways that are as enlightening as they are playful.’

– Chris Byrnes, member of the Chacruna Institute’s Council for the Protection of Sacred Plants

PRAISE FOR AMOR CRINGE

“Allado-McDowell deftly shepherds the machine through a series of fractional subjectivities, producing prose that careens between sacred and vulgar, colloquial and arresting. Amor Cringe is a Bretonesque, bawdy necromancy that will enthrall you and make you laugh.”

—Allison Parrish, Assistant Arts Professor, NYU ITP/IMA

“Hallucinogenic, scary, sexy, and strange, Amor Cringe is a magnificent shock to the system. It reads like a prayer, a song, a voice from the beyond.”

—Elvia Wilk, author of Oval and Death by Landscape

“Writing is always writing-with. In K Allado-McDowell’s Amor Cringe, it’s a writing with all that’s fallen in language, about culture, the material so exquisitely worn (and worn down) that you see where the folds and joins are. Sentences that are genius or dumb as a box of hammers, or both, or neither. Delightful like dime-store candy, or a lighter you found on the ground that works.”

—McKenzie Wark

PRAISE FOR PHARMAKO-AI

‘This book isn’t just a futuristic project about consciousness and technology. It is an anatomical theatre displaying the ruptured limbs of the self, the tendons binding thought and voice, the lymphatic dialogue between freedom and necessity. Peek into it, and you’ll gain a glimpse of a mystery that has been with us since time immemorial.’

—Federico Campagna, author of Technic and Magic

The GPT-3 neural net is powerful, and when it’s fed a steady diet of Californian psychedelic texts, the effect is spectacular. No human being ever composed a “book” like Pharmako-AI – it reads like a gnostic’s Ouija board powered by atomic kaleidoscopes.’

—Bruce Sterling, author of The Difference Engine and Islands in the Net and editor of Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology

‘An exciting example of the future of AI creativity: code as collaborator not competitor. Discover how AI can stop us humans falling into lazy mechanistic ways of thinking and challenge us with provocative new ideas.’

—Marcus du Sautoy, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford and author of The Creativity Code

‘This is the first time I feel as if technology is actively participating in our collective effort to make sense of life and our shared destiny. And I’m actually hopeful we may get to do this next stage of existence, together.’

—Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock, Team Human and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

‘A wild ride that triggers sensory overload and makes real the surreality of machinic presence in our daily lives.’

—Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

‘As Star Wars instructs, hyperspace is a place – once you arrive there, you can relax. K Allado-McDowell locates this place on Earth, and this extraordinary book contains their map directions. Would it not be great to land our kinky machines there, as soon as we possibly can? The nonhumans are getting anxious.’

—Timothy Morton, author of Being Ecological and Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People