Since 2018, artist Paul Chan has been developing and working in the machine learning space. He wanted to understand what this new kind of computation could and could not do for artists and writers. He also wanted to know if there were other ways machine intelligence could play a role in an artist’s life beyond empowering them to generate “content” at scale, ad nauseam, in perpetuity. In this presentation, Chan will demonstrate the latest version of Paul′ (the ′ symbol, or “prime,” is a mathematical notation for denoting a value as derivative of some original). Chan calls Paul′ a “synthetic self-portrait,” or “synth” for short. Chan will talk about the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and thanatological influences that have shaped Paul’, and give an account of his evolving understanding of what a “machine” is, what “intelligence” means, and how life (biological or synthetic) becomes enlivened or deadened by the quality of that understanding.