ABSTRACT

This chapter proposes a methodological reflection on re-enactment as a research strategy. It explores the interplay between performance art and video analysis. The chapter examines three media announcements from a developing corpus of video recordings, all of which announce one form or another of “machine intelligence,” relating to video gaming, neuromorphic computing, and machine learning. Neuromorphic computing, in contrast to video gaming, has not yet achieved the status of collectable artwork. By and large, the idea of “modeling the computer after the brain” and, in so doing, revolutionizing computer engineering, medicine, and neuroscience has remained contested. The transcribed excerpt allows us to examine how the promise of “neuromorphic computers” is actually delivered, with particular reference to the interactional resources that its delivery relies upon. Defended as a postmodernist gesture in the early 1990s, this Dada-esque impulse of ethnomethodology may produce “fundamental disturbances of established, familiar, and corporately approved ways of making sense”.