Remodeling Rationality: A History of Unorthodox Computing and AI
A History & Theory of New Media lecture, presented as part of BCNM's Latinx & Latin American Media Ecologies program
with Rodrigo Ochigame
Historian and Anthropologist of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Assistant Professor at Leiden University, Netherlands
What does it mean to be “rational”? Since the mid-twentieth century, the concept of rationality has become associated with certain formal models of computation, from mathematical logic and Turing machines to artificial neural networks. Such models are often assumed to be objective, value-neutral, and even universal. Challenging such assumptions, this presentation investigates the history of unorthodox models of computational reasoning during the Cold War. It examines how mathematicians, scientists, and engineers from around the world not only offered epistemological and political critiques of dominant models of rationality but also proposed alternative computational models to replace them. In short, these actors “remodeled” rationality. They include Brazilian mathematicians who developed non-classical systems of logic, Indian scientists who imagined non-binary Turing machines, Cuban scientists who envisioned socialist information systems, Czech linguists who experimented with models of poetic language, and Ukrainian engineers who tried to encode “feelings” and “emotions” into the design of neural networks.
About Rodrigo Ochigame
Rodrigo Ochigame is a historian and anthropologist of computing and artificial intelligence, and an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Their current book project is a history of unorthodox models of computational reasoning during the Cold War. An earlier book, Informática do oprimido (in Portuguese, with a foreword by the Instituto Paulo Freire, 2025), examined how Latin American social movements inspired experiments with information systems. Ochigame holds a PhD from the Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and previously studied computer science and social sciences at UC Berkeley.
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