K Allado-McDowell

K Allado-McDowell sees our culture as one erupting into a new age of creative practice: one of “neural media.” In their view, we are in the early days of a great technological and artistic shift flowering out of prior modes of broadcast and network culture — a shift fueled by new tools and phenomena like AI and generative media.

As a writer, artist, and technologist, K’s work actively explores the bounds of Neural Media as a form, seeking to identify both what we are able to create using this new paradigm and how it recursively shapes our own thinking and creative processes. Drawing on histories of design, technology, and culture, Allado-McDowell will reveal how previous media regimes shaped culture and subjectivity, and how neural media like AI now shape our perception, self-conception, and knowledge of reality. Against the backdrop of climate change and mass extinction, neural media present unique challenges and opportunities, which Allado-McDowell explores through their own work.

About K Allado-McDowell

K Allado-McDowell is a writer, artist, and musician. A foundational figure in the field of AI literature, they have authored several books with GPT-3, co-edited and contributed to multiple anthologies, and write on art, AI and ecology. K also established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google. They are a conference speaker, educator, and consultant to institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.

Why This Talk Matters Now

Over the past decade, the technological and creative potentials of artificial intelligence have become increasingly clear. The text and images produced by generative AI models have gone from science fiction to novelties to commonplace parts of the creative landscape. 

When Allado-McDowell refers to “neural media,” they refer not just to generative AI but all forms of media based around networks of neurons (or mathematical abstractions modeling them, in the case of AI). As we engage with neural media, we interface not just with each individual node or neuron within the net, but the layers of meaning embedded in the connections between those points. In our encounter with artificial neural networks, we find ourselves — for our brains, too, are neural media — the first of their kind, but not the last. 

The Long View

Neural Media is one of the three core frames through which Long Now Talks seek to understand our world in the long view. For more on these frames, read Long Now Board President Patrick Dowd’s introductory essay on Reframing the Future.

Allado-McDowell places their thinking in the context of media theorist Fred Turner’s work. Turner, who has previously given a Long Now Talk about Technology & Counterculture from World War II to Today, has written extensively about how new media technologies reshaped American and global culture over the course of the twentieth century. In The Democratic Surround and From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Turner identifies the shifts from the broadcast media of the early twentieth century to the network media of the 01980s and onwards. Allado-McDowell sees neural media as the successor to network media, a further emergence that builds upon the technocultural infrastructure of the twentieth century but is a phenomenon all its own.  

Where to go next

Read K Allado-McDowell’s essays on Designing Neural Media and Neural Interpellation in Gropius Bau.

In MoMA’s Magazine, K Allado-McDowell explores the potential of AI as a poison — one that can be used to harm or to heal.

Watch K Allado-McDowell’s TED talk on how Our Creative Relationship With AI Is Just Beginning.

Join us

Want to explore the potential of neural media more deeply? Join us on February 25, 02025 at 7 PM PT at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco for K Allado-McDowell’s Long Now Talk.