Drew S. Burk
Drew S. Burk is a philosopher, translator, and editor of Univocal, a publishing series with the University of Minnesota Press. His various writings, from fiction to theoretical essays on neuro-technology, artificial intelligence, and archival anamnesis, can be found online in various experimental culture and arts journals such as E-Flux, Angelaki, more recently on the platform, Alienocene. www.alienocene.com Burk’s most recent translation is Eric Baratay’s Feline Cultures (University of Georgia Press, 2023) on the 300-year French cultural history and co-poetic domestication of cats and humans. He has also served as a consulting editor for the Vilem Flusser Archive collection with University of Minnesota Press.
Articles of Drew S. Burk
Cybernetic Memories: Flusser’s Apparatus in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
This essay revisits Vilém Flusser’s concept of cybernetic memories to examine artificial intelligence as a terminal stage of the Apparatus, where predictive archives risk foreclosing the event of memory itself. Through dialogue with Bernard Stiegler, Jacques Derrida, Frédéric Neyrat, and Gilbert Simondon, it distinguishes memory as storage from memory as embodied impression, arguing that forgetting, abstraction, and rupture are conditions of learning and individuation. Against predictive temporality, the essay proposes prophetic survival, dialogical cybernetics, and the mechanologist as figures for preserving mental integrity, techno-intersubjectivity, and the human capacity for deep memory within AI-mediated technical systems.