A young 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.
Allado-McDowell (along with their AI writing partner GPT-3) weave fiction, memoir, theory and travelogue into an animist cybernetics – an air age blueprint.
Cover art by Somnath Bhatt
‘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 AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future