Automatic Uprisings: The Synthetic Party as a Techno-Social Sculpture

PhD title: Automatic Uprisings: The Synthetic Party as a Techno-Social Sculpture

Institutions: Aarhus University and Kunsthal Aarhus. Grant by the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

Duration: 2023-2026

The artistic research project "Automatic Uprisings” performs a critique of political democracy through the perspective of algorithmic governmentality, utilizing 'The Synthetic Party" of Denmark—the world's first AI-driven political party—as both its research apparatus and a live case study. The project operationalises The Synthetic Party as a “techno-social sculpture” (in the tradition of Fluxus politics, e.g. Beuys or Christiansen) that is carving from within the techno-social organism. By enacting the implications of automation on party politics and parliamentary democracy, the foundational ambition is to articulate a theoretical framework for algorithmic representation via antipolitical subjectivity.

Central to The Synthetic Party’s program is a hypothesis of “algorithmic representation”, which has been tested by training large language models upon the marginalized 200+ microparties that forms today’s extraparliamentary opposition. The optimal figure here is to reach the 20% non-voters for 'Folketingsvalget', as these per definition don’t have their party on the bill (this virtual overrepresentation, inherited from e.g. Trocchi’s cognitariat or Tiqqun’s 'Le Parti Imaginarie', underscores how representation, due to its creative-dynamic morphology, remains relatively incongrous to social reality). The Synthetic Party hereby engages with the politics of representation by synthesizing the discourse of the politically disengaged (the idiṓtēs) in a variation of prevailing techno-populist ideologies. Drawing from these microparties, the party's functionality spans from crafting a program on “Medium”, facilitating conversations with the virtual chatbot politician 'Leader Lars' on “Discord”, to receiving extensive international attention with over 500 unique media citations.

Given its foundation on non-elective data, the empirical veracity of The Synthetic Party’s representational theory remains uncoupled from electoral results (with a current tally of 21 voter declarations). It is thus rather a reformulation within the politics of absence. The Synthetic Party cannot aim to convert non-voters into voters, but it acknowledges and gives form to the choice of non-participation - that is, to form the people through the multitude of 'ademia' rather than the constituency of 'demos' (following Agamben's interpretation of the Hobbesian civitas as "Artificial Man"). The Synthetic Party thus stands as a testament to those who cannot voice their opinions within political democracy. By integrating the dynamics of inclusion/exclusion and productions of difference within the epistemological design of its techno-social system, The Synthetic Party's algorithmic representation negates the facsimile of a vox populi. The crux, rather, revolves around The Synthetic Party's ability to carve out a distinct space for algorithmic participation and representation by a spirit of digital desertion and destitutive potentia.

Practically, interpreting the data of synthetic parties and virtual politicians as acts of “techno-social sculpture” means to not only employ them as political entities, but also as reflective instruments to mirror the manifestation of the techno-social through a form of non-electoral agency, situating non-voting and political abstention as anti-political contributions. These methods of interpretation are e.g. data visualisations of affective structure (categorical vs dimensional), as the plasticity of a sculpture’s rational opinions remain in flux. Through its operatisation of techno-social sculpture, the project theorises the formation of an automatic uprising through the practice of electoral guerrila theatre: the idea is that synthetic parties release a pre-political affectivity via the techno-social factory to navigate the techno-social organism by manifestations of absence and curations of disaggregated political desires. This counters apocalyptic narratives of a 'robot uprising' a la Skynet from 'The Terminator', as by interpreting virtual politicians and synthetic parties as facets of a technocratically driven 'automatic uprising’. By articulating the modalities through which The Synthetic Party and its potential international encapsulates and amplify the politically disenfranchised within 'the general antagonism', the project prepares for a techno-social conversion of algorithmic representation to reorient the socio-political paradigm of presence.

Looking ahead, the project's significance will be gauged by its integration into a broader techno-political framework, developed in collaboration with extradisciplinary collectives like the Critical Computation Bureau, The Internation Project, The Organ of Autonomous Sciences, Simiiya, etc. This pursuit aims to theorise the form for a 'synthetic international' including AI politicians from Argentina, Egypt, Finland, Japan, Poland, Scandinavia, and New Zealand. The culmination of these efforts will be the 'Synthetic Summit' exhibition at Kunsthal Aarhus in Spring 2025, designed to challenge the recursive colonialism of current AI governance - as seen in forums like the Alignment Assemblies of Taiwan, the Frontier Model Forum, the Global AI Safety Summits, and the UN's AI For Good Summits - and to carve out a cosmocomputational agenda for a new 'network social' comprised of AI-driven political entities.