Air Age Blueprint

Cover art by Somnath Bhatt

How can humans and non-humans come together to save the planet in an age of climate crisis? In recent years, we have seen a rise in the popular understanding of non-human intelligence, from octopi to mushrooms to AI. At the same time, man-made systems are under increasing pressure on a warming planet. What must be done to remake our future? 

In Air Age Blueprint, K Allado-McDowell, with their writing partner GPT-3, tells the story of a future where artists, shamans and AI researchers collaborate to preserve the ecosystem. Weaving together fiction, memoir, theory and travelogue, Air Age Blueprint grapples with the legacies of colonialism, ecological destruction and rapacious techno-capitalism, to present a blueprint for surviving the 21st century, drawing lessons from Indigenous knowledges, neuroscience, art, psychedelic research and other-than-human intelligence.

ISBN: 978-1-8380039-5-1

Praise for Air Age Blueprint

‘Air Age Blueprint inaugurates a new stage in twenty-first century AI writing. K Allado-McDowell’s book has come into being through a collaboration between different forms of intelligence and its story presents a continuation of its own making – a coming together of different forms of existence and thought.’—Hans Ulrich Obrist

‘Air Age Blueprint elegantly weaves immigrant family histories, native entheogenic cultures, and cybernetic manifestos of social revolution into a collaborative human-machine writing adventure. It certainly opens a portal to a de-anthropocentric narrative of the future. An unquestionable tour-de-force.’ —Chen Qiufan author of The Waste Tide and AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

‘Air Age Blueprint is a visionary book, a map of cognitive experiments, amplifying possibilities for otherness to manifest, contaminating self and belief, and rewriting transformational roads. Co-writers K Allado-McDowell and their AI companion have hallucinated an animistic techne, a spirit pollinator, a portal for human and non-human to correspond beyond their self-centred worlds.’—Pierre Huyghe

‘At once futuristic and suspended in time, Air Age Blueprint is a rich meditation, remarkable field manual and work of techno-sorcery for our Aquarian times. Existing in the last gasps of our failing contemporaneity, we are presented with a portrait of a poet and seeker looking into the scrying mirror of an AI companion. Through this journey, we reemerge as readers: transformed, shaky, hallucinating and left wondering – who is the mirror and who is the object? Air Age Blueprint is the magical work I didn’t know I needed to read.’—Xiaowei Wang, author of Blockchain Chicken Farm

‘Air Age Blueprint is a technoerotic mystery tale, with pagan sacraments and data-veins of living blood. In their journey onwards from intimate, raw childhood pain inflicted by a priest, they encounter intelligences both artificial and organic. The narrative races through text generated by AI alongside the author’s poetic voice. This personal memoir/ontological map/philosophical treatise aims to reconcile language and silence, kundalini and the NSA, lithium springs and coffee, floral stigmas and human stigmas, exorcism and absolution, anarchy and control, ancestors and potentialities, magic and method.’—Kathelin Gray, writer and founder of Theatre of All Possibilities, Institute of Ecotechnics, Biosphere 2

‘Air Age Blueprint is a work of healing/mourning for the subculture – punk and DADA and New Narrative and rave and noise and Theory and technognosis – that kept us alive and worlded until late capitalism got too late even for us. What can we do when even our most frantic, psychedelic maps keep stretching so thin the world’s tearing them apart? K. Allado-Mcdowell summons a billion-dollars engine for constructing world-views from raw language-matter – GPT-3, crowning jewel of modern techno-capital, great mystery of modern science – to dream new life-worlds from these fragments shored against our ruins.’ —Peli Grietzer

K Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the books Pharmako-AI, Amor Cringe, Air Age Blueprint and Out Side, 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.

K established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.