Me & My Monkey and the Origins of AI
Schedule
Wed, 10 Sep, 2025 at 07:00 pm
UTC-04:00Location
529 W Chestnut St, Lancaster, PA, United States, Pennsylvania 17603 | Lancaster, PA
You’re invited to a wild ride through sonic collage and historical excavation, original scores and obscure samples that will transport you back to a primal scene of the origins of AI. ___________________________
*About the Event*
September 10
7-9pm
FREE and open to the public. All are welcome.
Food, drink, conversation with the Me & My Monkey mixtape movie premiere from 7:30-8:30
529 West Chestnut St
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*About Me & My Monkey*
Listen here, for the first time, to a love story for the ages. Return to a moment when computers were being born and a particular vision of intelligence came into stark relief. Experience some of the first dreams of automated cognition.
In 1942 a young psychologist named Donald Hebb met Alpha, a chimpanzee who lived in a cage at the Yerkes Laboratory for Primate Biology. Amidst whispers of “extra-species eroticism,” their 5-year relationship was filled with scrupulous attention to detail, diagnoses of madness, eruptions of rage, and calculated acts of violence.
Their torrid affair also gave birth to the large language models in our midst and the contemporary fetish for artificial neural networks.
Hosted by Modern Art and the Institute of the Mechanical Surround:
https://www.itsmodernart.com
https://www.mechanicalsurround.com
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*About Modern Art's current installation, Mixtape Metaphysics*
Mixtape Metaphysics is a multimedia installation offering an opportunity to explore pressing questions about our current state of technological saturation. Participate in an interactive human algorithm game, listen in to a series of mixtape meditations, or just come talk. We invite you to slow down, listen, play, and interact with theoretical concepts around philosophy, technology, and religion. All are welcome, free and open to the public on tuesdays from 6-8, by appointment, or any other day by chance.
In a world increasingly enamored with Artificial Intelligence, and machines that offer to think for us, Mixtape Metaphysics reminds us to remember how to use the very human machines inside our heads.
