Join us for the release of the Institute of Mechanical Surround’s latest mixtape: Me & My Monkey and the Origins of Artificial Intelligence.

Wednesday, September 10
7-9pm
Free and open to the public!

Through sonic collage and historical excavation, original scores and an archive of obscure samples, Me & My Monkey transports you back to a primal scene of the origins of artificial intelligence. 

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. 

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.

And bear witness to the tortured knowledge that these dreams produced.