connor cook

#cheerleading #allstarcheer

#unrealengine5 #blender #clo3d #marvelousdesigner #allstarcheer #cheerleadersofinstagram

For the past year, I’ve been developing a new project based on my experience as a member of the Dutch national cheerleading team @teamcheernl . I see cheerleading as a technological practice that transforms bodies into machine components. Through synchronization, coordination, and differentiation, the cheerleading team produces an evolving informatic structure/spectacle also known as a routine. I’ve developed a workflow that uses Unreal Engine and Ableton Live to create a workflow for real-time avatar animation via MIDI controllers, using motion capture data recorded with members of the Dutch national team. This video portrait captures a bit of the process. Huge thanks the Creative Industries Fund NL @stimuleringsfonds for both the video and for supporting the development of the work through the Talent Development grant scheme. Forever grateful to the athletes and coaches of @teamcheernl . Being a member of the team was the highlight of my year, and it was an honor to help grow the sport in the Netherlands together. and thanks to @freudenheiim and @amfq for advising me during the process More to come!!!

some bits on cyberspace and network aesthetics for the upcoming COMPUTING unit of our MA studio at @kunsthogeschool

In the lecture film How to Think Unlike Humans?, Chen Qiufan provocatively interrogates the anthropocentric biases constraining human cognition, advocating for a radical epistemological recalibration through speculative fiction. Drawing upon emblematic literary works—Ken Liu’s exploration of multi-temporal beings, Jorge Luis Borges’s infinite informational labyrinth, Ted Chiang’s linguistic determinism, Vladimir Nabokov’s perceptual paranoia, N.K. Jemisin’s urban symbiosis, and Ursula Le Guin’s ecological sentience—Chen critiques humanity’s limited cognitive frameworks, suggesting they impede meaningful interactions with diverse intelligences. He challenges alignmentism in artificial intelligence, positing that reproducing human-centric thought risks catastrophic outcomes. Instead, Chen proposes embracing cognitive architectures embodied in nature’s distributed intelligence, exemplifying symbiosis as a paradigm for evolutionary and existential resilience. Urging a shift from individualistic consciousness to collective and ecological empathy, he articulates a vision where humanity must learn to “think unlike humans,” engaging imaginatively and compassionately with the planetary and cosmic others, thus enabling coexistence amid crises of unprecedented scale and complexity. Watch the How to Think Unlike Humans? film in Antikythera Journal at unlikehumans.antikythera.org or via link in bio. Author Chen Qiufan Graphic Design @e__type

When I was a kid, my username for everything was @coasterfreak92394 . Coaster freak lives on—I just had the opportunity to publish an essay on roller coasters for the “media aesthetics” issue of communication+1. Through a technical analysis of Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure (lol), I frame the contemporary roller coaster as an interface that allows the abstract operations of computation to be felt in the body. The sublimation of fear into pleasure that occurs in the ride experience echoes 18th-century Romantic ideas of the sublime, which I rework here to propose a new conception of the “techno-logical sublime.” full text available on the project page on my website (link in bio) big thank you to hank gerba and zachary mcdowell for including my piece in the issue

plug-play-rewire >> working on a website for the electro-cute-angel @e__type that diagrams each project as an informatic circuit — compressing the I/O flows, software/hardware logics, and encoding formats that structure his work. now live at [connorcook.xyz]

making my way downtown giessen de

This Spring, I took part in the inaugural @antikythera_xyz 2023 studio, exploring the speculative philosophy of planetary computation. Together with @dfzhu , we produced The Xenobiology Multiplex (Xenoplex): a parallelized origins of life simulation in which a coupled chemical-computational array simulates potential origins of life transitions based on exoplanet biosignatures, with the ultimate goal of understanding the mechanisms driving open-ended evolution. Check the film, essay, and website → / The Xenoplex consists of a chemical-computational array, wherein a multitude of origins of life simulations are run in parallel, thus acting as an evolutionary time-compression device. Departing from legacy Artificial Life experiments which attempt to simulate life entirely in silico, the Xenoplex makes use of the intrinsic creativity of real chemical systems. Each box in the array contains a “chemical soup” derived from exoplanet biosignatures. These chemical gradients are modified by gradient descent algorithms in parallel, in the hopes of producing “life-like” properties and behaviors. As new specialized properties (e.g. self-replication) are acquired by populations of these boxes, the conditions of both the chemical gradient and computational gradient descent get propagated to nearby boxes, thus optimizing different properties in parallel. --- studio researchers: @e__type , @dfzhu , special s/o to @6cara.quente9 who was foundational in development of the concept sound design: @beshkenxo graphic design: @600mt @janyfrrrcrnl @matteohwdfg scientific consultant: stuart bartlett mass spectrometry modeling: @wendiyan chinese translation: linda lai web dev: @felgorni program director: @benjaminbratton studio director: @nicolay.boyadjiev associate director: @detectiveyes senior program manager: emily knapp network operatives: @regretware @silkina_dasha_ art direction: @mmdzxp rendering and visuals in @unrealengine by @e__type Special thanks to The Berggruen Institute and One Project for their support for the inaugural year of Antikythera