Air Age Blueprint: K Allado-McDowell and Erik Davis in Conversation

Hosted by The Berkeley Alembic.

K Allado-McDowell reads from Air Age Blueprint, co-written with GPT-3. A speculative tale of a California filmmaker who encounters the world of Peruvian shamanism, the book is a fascinating follow-up to 2021’s oracular Pharmako-AI, which was the first book published in collaboration with the large language model.

Allado-McDowell, who established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI, is joined by author and Alembic co-founder Erik Davis for a conversation on human-machine poesis, entheogenic futurism and technological animism.

K Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the books Pharmako-AI, Amor Cringe and Air Age Blueprint, and are co-editor of The Atlas of Anomalous AI. They created the neuro-opera Song of the Ambassadors, and record and release music under the name Qenric. They are a conference speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding. K’s work has been covered by The New York Times, The Atlantic, WIRED, Bookforum, Artforum, Lithub, The Warburg Institute, Institute of Network Cultures, and by writers including Erik Davis and Bruce Clarke.

Erik Davis is an author, award-winning journalist, sometimes podcaster, and popular speaker based in San Francisco. He is the author of five books, including High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (MIT Press/Strange Attractor), Nomad Codes (Yeti), and the cult classic Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Crown). Davis graduated from Yale University in 1988, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University in 2015.