Together with Open Humanities Press, I am pleased to announce the publication of Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence by Gary Hall in my MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series.
Like all Open Humanities Press books, Masked Media is available open access (= it can be downloaded for free):
https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media
Book description
If we want a socially and environmentally just future, do we need a radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory? It’s this question Gary Hall and his collaborators have been addressing for over twenty years with experimental publishing projects such as Open Humanities Press, Liquid and Living Books, and the Culture-Led Re-Commoning of Cities. Unsettling received ideas of the author and the book, originality and copyright, real and artificial intelligence, these uncommon communities of theorist-mediums are testing the ‘non-modernist-liberal’ modes of creating and sharing knowledge enabled by various media technologies, from writing and print, through photography and video, to computers and GenAI. By thinking outside the masked black box that renders Euro-Western knowledge-making practices invisible – keeping the human ontologically separate from the nonhuman, be it animals, the planet or algorithmic machines – they show there’s no such thing as the human, the nonhuman already being in(the)human.
Masked Media is one such experimental project. It is not a ‘human-authored’ work. Instead, the thinking within it has been generated by a radically relational assemblage that includes AI and more. Although the book appears under a real name – ‘Gary Hall’ – which, like Banksy and Karen Eliot, acts as a mask, it is not the intellectual property of a singular human individual, and is published under a Collective Conditions for Re-Use licence to reflect this. Masked Media shows how such norm-critical experimentation is of vital importance to our understanding of everything, from identity politics and the decolonisation of knowledge, through epistemologies of the Global South and the possibilities of open city infrastructure, to extractive capitalism, planetary destruction and the Anthropocene. It thus constitutes a call to radically redesign theory for a time of multiple crises.
In Masked Media, a follow-up to A Stubborn Fury, Hall proceeds to show how our ways of writing and working can be reinvented to produce a more socially just future after the years of austerity and the coronavirus pandemic.
Author bio
Gary Hall is an experimental critical theorist working at the intersection of digital culture, politics and technology. He is Professor of Media at Coventry University, UK, where he served as founding director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures from 2017 to 2025. He is the author of a number of books, including A Stubborn Fury (Open Humanities Press, 2021), Pirate Philosophy (MIT Press, 2016) and The Uberfication of the University (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Best,
Joanna
—–
Joanna Zylinska
Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice
Director (Interim) of the Centre for Attention Studies
King's College London
Department of Digital Humanities
