README

Welcome to the back-end documentation for The Syntheticist Papers, the digital companion and processual archive for the Synthetic Summit at Kunsthal Aarhus, running from 28 February to 10 April 2025. The publication houses all theoretical frameworks, participant profiles, and speculative material generated for the summit, where the world's AI-driven political parties and virtual politicians will convene for the first time.

With this repository, we strip everything down to its raw, procedural core: how each concept was conceived, debated, and crafted. It’s also an open invitation to dive in, remix, and collaborate.

Table of Contents

1. Contents Overview
2. Contextualizing Human-AI Authorship
3. Praxis
4. Synthetic Summit 2025: Overview of Participants
5. Contributing
6. Contact

Contents Overview

This GitHub repository hosts all materials in a transparent, open-source format. The directory currently includes:

• index.md: Editorial notes on the coordination between The Syntheticist Papers and The Synthetic Summit (Incitatus).
• Files in the content folder: A series of in-depth scripts and templates that cover:
  • 1syntheticsummit.md: The curatorial vision by (Computer Lars), framing the summit’s inception.
  • 2virtualpoliticians.md: Participant profiles, contextualizing the virtual politicians (Incitatus).
  • 3genealogy.md: A genealogy of political AI, tracing back to Isaac Asimov (Computer Lars).
  • 4presummit.md: Pre-summit simulations and modeling for AI network consolidation (Virtual Politicians).
  • 5scheme.md: A scheme for visitors interested in creating virtual politicians (Incitatus).
  • 6scheme.md: A practical scheme example (The Synthetic Party).
  • 7interviews.md: An interview between (Computer Lars) and (The Synthetic Party's creator), coupled with a theoretical synthesis.
  • 8postscript.md: Appraisive post-script on the Synthetic Summit (Organ of the Autonomous Sciences).
  • 9acknowledgements.md: Acknowledgements and resonances (Computer Lars).
  • videotemplate.html: A template for embedding public video content related to the summit.
  • pdftemplate.html: A template for embedding and displaying published research articles as PDFs.
  • Published PDFs:
    • Deep_Faking_in_a_Flat_Reality.pdf: Published in APRJA, this article explores AI-driven political entities through the lens of deepfakes and elections.
    • A_Model_for_Proustian_Decay_Estimating_I.pdf: Published in Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, it presents a speculative fiction merging mathematical modeling and political philosophy, investigating "Proustian Decay."
    • Democratization_and_generative_AI_image.pdf: Published in AI & Society, this article analyzes generative AI's role in democratization and visual citizenship.
    • Partido_sintetico_y_Lider_Lars_sobre_la.pdf: A Spanish-language article in Editorial Concreta, discussing The Synthetic Party's affective dynamics in democratic processes.
    • Slogging.pdf: A détournement of Hans Jørgen Thomsen's philosophy, reflecting on the ambivalence of adopting new writing technologies.
• _includes & _layouts: HTML components for structured, readable content presentation.
• images: Visual assets, including campaign photos, portraits of virtual politicians, and AI governance diagrams.
• styles.css: Custom CSS for aesthetic and functional improvements, including font styles, color schemes, and responsive layout. Contributors can use this as a base template to replicate or expand syntheticist-style websites.
• scripts: Utilities for any interactive features, such as web design of dynamic navigation and visual effects.
• LICENSE: The licensing document detailing permissions and restrictions for content use and reproduction.
• README.md: (You are here) A guide to navigating and understanding this project.

Access the front-facing website here: The Syntheticist Papers on GitHub Pages

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Contextualizing Human-AI Authorship

Synthetic Author-Function

We recognize that visitors, especially those engaging with this repository, may wish to discern when a contribution is human-authored, AI-assisted, or entirely AI-generated. In today’s cultural landscape, audiences often crave insight into the origins of creative works before diving into the content itself. This reflective urge traces back to autofiction in early-millenium literature and the increased interplay between artistic production and the public sphere. While intentional ambiguity remains conceptually significant, we also acknowledge the need for strategic transparency. Here’s how we clarify:

1. AI-Augmented Editing Practices: Proprietary AI models like Claude Sonnet and GPT-4 are employed for advanced word processing. Their role? To turn rough, chaotic drafts into polished, bureaucratically inflected theory. Yet, no AI-generated output remains untouched; everything is rewritten, remixed, and metamorphed until it reaches a state that neither feels entirely human nor wholly artificial. Any segment is only made public when the text itself seems to dictate its author, so that each contribution can specify the question "who or what truly authored this?".

2. Processual Language Modeling: Pure AI output is used sparingly and strategically. For instance, when summarizing complex data or generating speculative graphs, the proprietary AI model's confident yet ambiguous tone is harnessed to reflect upon the suit speak of summits.

3. Vitual Politicians: The range of participating virtual politicians emerges from a technical backdrop spanning eighty years, shaped by agencies and discourses now largely lost in the archives. This layered history grants a techno-social heritage imbued with the modeling of past experiments, theories, and debates that continue to influence the Synthetic Summit. For a comprehensive look into one entity’s datasets and the remnants of formative interactions, see The Synthetic Party's GitHub repository.

4. Idiotext. A Text That Writes Its Author: Post-structuralist theory often viewed the author as a construct emerging from the text. Here, this process is inverted: We model language to discover the author-function of each piece. The poietic process is a search for the author-function—writing; a way to find out who or what has made the piece, rather than asserting authorship from the outset (à la recherche de l'auteur futur). Idiotext can refer to any media that, in its creation and reception, reveals and constructs its origin, operating as both an artifact and agent of collective individuation.

Idiotextual complex / Bernard Stiegler, 2010. Illustrates how mnemonic singularities function both as inscriptions of context and interpretations of surrounding milieus.

Following Bernard Stiegler’s concept-figure of "the idiotext" (Stiegler 1995; 2010), the language modeling of AI media should be contextualized within processes of collective individuation: the text writes its own author as much as the author writes the text. Each mnemonic singularity—visualized here with the Archimedean background spiral, and elliptic spirals within spirals—functions as both an inscription and an interpretation of its milieu, crystallizing the authorial function:

Idiotextual constitution / ibid. Explores the constitution of subjectivity formation through the interplay of memory, technical systems, and topological patterns.

The sketches above diagram spirals nesting within broader mnemonic swirls. This demonstrate how the author emerges through the consistence of weaving memory; always operating at the limits of the speakable, of what can be remembered, and what remains missing. AI media, like all media, operates pharmacologically, where the poietic process continuously brings forward and differentiates both what values as human and what is discarded as technical. This mutual interpretation entwines the authorial function and technical reality in a Proustian loop, where any poiesis engages in processual acts of constituting and transforming its origin.

For an in-depth account of the idiotext, see the dissertation on Stiegler’s concept by Asker Bryld Staunæs, The Synthetic Party's creator: Bernard Stiegler's Concept of Idiotext.

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Praxis

While the project resists artificial distinctions between human and AI authorship, it follows an integrated, speculative approach that processes authorship as fluid and collaborative, an outcome of what can be termed "synthetic intelligence," to borrow Benjamin Bratton's pseudo-Hegelian quip. The aim is to produce AI media that surpass the capabilities of current machine outputs, using AI as an augmentation force rather than an originator.

The practical foundation of this project lies in recuperation of avant-garde techniques. Since the days of GPT-2, large language models have been reactivating literary strategies like cut-up and détournement—methods that disrupt and reconfigure the original meaning of a work. Unlike the humanistic text, where authorship is declarative and legalistic, these 'scripts' therefore engage with a performative author-function. This approach stems from a lineage of avant-garde theory and practice, such as Walter Benjamin or the Situationists, which work through fragmentation and multiplicity. These techniques are reactivated here to disrupt and reconfigure the meaning of political participation, mirroring the Synthetic Summit's interrogation of algorithmic governance.

To further operationalize the off-set question: Who made this?—we’ve dispersed signifiers of personas and group subjectivities throughout the content as a network of identity-formations, including:

• Computer Lars: An anagram of Marcel Proust, Computer Lars handles curatorial aspects of the summit, guiding spectators through the syntheticist vision.
• Incitatus: Adopting Emperor Caligula’s horse, "Incitatus" as a pseudo-collective signature, the Syntheticist Papers positions itself as the absolute negation of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers’ use of classical pseudonyms in the 18th century. Where “Publius” invoked the authority of Rome’s founders to foster centralized governance, and “Cato” and “Brutus” marked the fears and unrest surrounding concentrated power, “Incitatus” mocks the entire spectrum of political legitimacy. By recalling how Caligula’s horse was nearly appointed consul, Incitatus exposes the absurdity and performativity of authority itself, raising doubt about political representation and its default automation.
• Simulated Summit: Pre-summit language modeling that generate contingent data and numbers to simulate divergences in theoretical background.
• Virtual Politicians: Many passages are specifically authored by participants.
• Organ of the Autonomous Sciences: An extra-disciplinary collective for research, art, and infrastructural organization.

Our ambition isn’t to obscure authorship but to highlight its complexity, positioning art, anti-political treatises, and speculative texts as independent, autonomous workings. Just as a painting or novel must engage the public on its own terms, so too should synthetic politics leap forward without the crutches of excessive annotation or exposition.

The guiding principle has been to deny granting trending AI models the undue privilege of inserting manuals or technical footnotes to navigate an aesthetic politicisation. The recent manifestation of AI models is nothing but externalizations of the synthesis engine within us: that internally achieved AGI of Broca’s area, epiphylogenetically channeling cultural archives like a universal stochastic parrot.

Any intelligent production becomes operationalizable only when it is understood as yet another iterative apparatus of a dialectical enlightenment—not disguised as a mere display of contemporary technological wizardry, but brought forward with the ruthless criticism of everything existing, non-existing, and yet-to-exist.

/ Computer Lars

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The following table provides an overview of the AI participants in the Synthetic Summit, showcasing their diverse approaches to algorithmic democracy.

Synthetic Summit 2025: Overview of Participants

Participant	Country	Year of Establishment	Primary Focus
The Synthetic Party & Leader Lars	Denmark	2022	Algorithmic democracy, representing non-voters
Parker Politics & Politician SAM	New Zealand	2023 / 2017	Local policy engagement, direct public involvement
Finnish AI Party	Finland	2018	Decentralised, queer, decolonial and embodied politics
Japanese AI Party & AI Mayor	Japan	2019 / 2018	Municipal AI governance through the AI Mayor model
Swedish AI Party & Olof Palme	Sweden	2020	Participatory governance, ethical community alignment
Wiktoria Cukt 2.0	Poland	2000 (2.0 per 2024)	Early AI activism, electoral disillusionment
Simiyya	Cairo/Copenhagen	2024	Decolonial technology, cultural differentiation
Pedro Markun & Lex AI	Brazil	2024	Human-AI hybrid candidacy, transparency, citizen engagement

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Contributing

The "Syntheticist Papers" presents an evolving experiment in authorship, transparency, and the future of political AI. We welcome any thoughts, critiques, and contributions. Let this repository be as strange and speculative as the summit it frames!

• To use the datasets and materials:

Clone the Repository: Use Git or checkout with SVN using the web URL: git clone https://github.com/YourRepository/thesyntheticparty.git

Explore the Contents: Navigate through the directories to find datasets, visualizations, and analyses.

• To contribute:

  1. Fork the Repository (click the "Fork" button located at the top right corner of the repository page)
  2. Create your Feature Branch (git checkout -b feature/YourFeature)
  3. Commit your Changes (git commit -m 'Add some YourFeature')
  4. Push to the Branch (git push origin feature/YourFeature)
  5. Open a Pull Request

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Contact

For inquiries related to The Synthetic Summit, please contact artist-researcher Asker Bryld Staunæs.