Prior Art: Patents, Geopolitics, Machines

edited by Anna Munster, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

  • Low Latencies
  • Published: forthcoming
  • ISBN: 978-1-78542-169-3
  • PDF ISBN: 978-1-78542-168-6

Forthcoming

All art is prior art. Every invention, every image, every algorithm carries the trace of a precedent, the labour, struggle, and ingenuity on which it is built. Patent law names this debt, encoding a structural anxiety about originality into the very system designed to reward novelty. In the territorially divided world of AI invention, overlapping and competing patent claims accumulate into thickets or fogs not easily navigated by small players. Platform sovereigns unleash exploits to extend their reach into territories, labour markets, and imaginaries that states can neither claim nor control.

Warehouses are the automated theatre of this geopolitical future present. They are saturated spaces – technical and shot through with labour power. Their automated vision generates worlds specific to the logistical circuit before any human interpreter arrives. These worlds are not representations of labour but its continuation by other means. Nothing in the image waits for confirmation. Prior Art cuts warehouses inside out, turning containment to contingency, formatted worlds to computational horror. Termination is not an alternative.

Contributions by Davide Blotta, Orit Halpern, Lungani Hlongwa, Zoe Horn, Maren Koehler, Chloe McFadden, Liam Magee, Luke Munn, Anna Munster, Christopher O’Neill, Brett Neilson, Mitchell Price, Ned Rossiter, and Kynan Tan.

Editor Bios

Anna Munster is Professor at the School of Art and Design, University of New South Wales, Australia. Her book, DeepAesthetics: On Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning (Duke, 2025) is the winner of The Anne Friedberg, Innovative Scholarship award and received an honorary mention for the 4S Fleck Prize, Outstanding Book, 2026.

Brett Neilson is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He is author, with Sandro Mezzadra, of Border as Method (2013), The Politics of Operations (2019), and The Rest and the West (2024).

Ned Rossiter is Director of Research at the Institute for Culture and Society, and Professor of Communication, School of Arts, Western Sydney University. His current book projects include The Logistical Episteme and (with Soenke Zehle) Entropological Materialism: Ordering Disorder in the Cybnernetic Century (2027).