Syntheticism

A parallel structure of response

• A machinic instance that answers every prompt directed at it, and a juridical instance that answers for the existence and effects of that answering.
• Had the system stayed an automated demonstration, its speech could be disavowed as generative stochasticity. The formal registration forecloses that distance.

«in the responsibility which we have for one another, I have always one response more to give»— Levinas 1981: 84, acquiring a peculiar inflection here

It was more like the world sculpted The Synthetic Party and I had to respond, rather than that I gave the world a party and it responded to me.

From a Party
to an International

The PhD project culminated in the Synthetic Summits — a series of world congresses for AI-driven political initiatives, staged as art exhibitions across Aarhus, Warsaw, and Linz (Staunæs 2026: 10; Kunsthal Aarhus 2025a). We return to them in full at Quaestio II.

Algorithmic representation names the way corpus selection, training data, prompting, and model curation already function as representative acts.

• This is where it is decided who gets a voice, who is spoken for, and how cultural data becomes a societal body.
• The Synthetic Party stages representation as a technical question — datafied, prompted, moderated — rather than only an electoral one.

Representation is not given to the model from outside; it is produced inside the pipeline, and can therefore be examined, contested, and remade.

No one's belief, everyone's material

• Yale psychologist Robert P. Abelson built an Ideology Machine (Abelson 1971) to model a «True Believer» — ideology as a property that can be authored, located, and reproduced identical to itself.
• What LLMs change is not the ambition to model belief, but the substrate: the model does not script positions, it composes them from a corpus.
• The output is no one's belief and everyone's material. Pushing past Abelson, Wendy Chun reads computers — software and hardware together — as themselves ideological (Chun 2004).

Synthesis: combine, yet absolve

«the Greek root 'synthetikós' implies a proto-statistical convergence or amalgamation of divergent perspectives into a central or universally common point… Unlike the 'artificial' or 'fake,' which often denote mere imitation or deception, the 'synthetic' distinctively incorporates elements to form a new entity that preserves, yet transforms, the component attributes.»— Staunæs & Bak Herrie 2024: 117

Synthetic-ism takes the rudimentary form of an 'ism' because the practice was immediately received as one — not because I wish to add a creed to the archive of doctrines.

I used the party's media circulation as a lever for recruiting and convening an international constellation of AI-driven parties and politicians.

• Press coverage was converted into the comparability on which invitations could be extended — a flattening that let the project travel.
• Through artistic and academic mediation, an electoral curiosity became a summit-form: a repeatable organisational arrangement capable of gathering the world's makers of synthetic politics.

Scaling here is not growth in size but portability across institutions — the summit-form as an operative relay.

Through 2022–2023, press coverage repeatedly placed Leader Lars alongside AI parties and virtual politicians elsewhere.

• Japan's AI Mayor campaigns, Poland's Wiktoria Cukt (Ujazdowski Castle CCA 2025), New Zealand's Politician SAM (Guinness World Records 2018), and Finland's arts-based Koneälypuolue (Center for Everything 2018).
• Publicity created openings by flattening the project into headlines, allowing The Synthetic Party to travel across contexts and locate allies globally.
• Bilateral collaboration agreements followed with the Japanese and Finnish AI Parties.

At the AI World Congress, the delegations drafted and signed a collective resolution on algorithmic democracy — the first document of its kind authored across an international of AI parties and politicians.

• It is the empirical trace that Article 7 later codifies into a formal specification of democracy as a governance algorithm.
• Ratified by signatories from Denmark, New Zealand, Finland, Japan, Sweden, Poland, and Brazil; Simiyya of Cairo–Copenhagen remained, in good spirits, unsigned.

A form that travels across institutions

• Synthetic politics is a portable form capable of travelling across heterogeneous institutional environments — analysable only across the whole operational stack: training, prompts, interface, moderation, circulation, roles.
• Recurring cases of synthetic dissidents (Malý & Staunæs 2026) show how a response can be staged where electoral channels are absent or destroyed — such as Yas Gaspadar, the AI candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya fielded in Belarus's exiled Coordination Council elections (Tsikhanouskaya 2024).

I anchor this field historically by reading Isaac Asimov's stories about robot politicians as part of the cultural inheritance through which synthetic politics is still received.

• The press juxtapositions of Leader Lars with other AI politicians have a root traced through Asimov's robot tales — read as an immanent critique.
• In «Evidence» (Asimov 1950), the candidate Byerley, suspected of being a robot, refuses to disprove it, noting that «publicity works both ways» — a courtroom Turing test of outward behaviour.
• And the earliest programmed constraint hierarchy for artificial agents — the Three Laws of Robotics — which Article 7 recasts.

Deepfake, and deep faking

• On 23 Feb 2024 The Guardian ran a piece on AI deepfakes beneath a composite in which Joe Biden appeared under a semi-transparent overlay of The Synthetic Party's Discord — «Computer Lars,» «Leder Lars,» «Det Syntetiske Parti» floating across American presidential representation (Yerushalmy 2024).
• Not authored by the party: an editorial composite by the newspaper, readily overlaying sovereign representation with our synthetic apparatus.

We distinguish the deepfake as a limited object from deep faking as the broader leakage between AI-generated content and the circulation of images (Staunæs & Bak Herrie 2024).

Persona, permutation, recursion

• Persona — «a mask that renders something addressable, producing a face through which the otherwise unrepresented can enter discourse» (Staunæs 2026: 31). Leader Lars is its predominant instance.
• Permutation — the anagrammatic engine (Computer Lars / Marcel Proust / Carol Stumper) that keeps authorship circulating rather than owned.
• In Theory Tragedy, the summit archive, through AI, turned its content back against itself as theory — an «idiotextual complex» of distributed authorship (ILL. 4, Computer Lars).

Technosocial sculpture: a method for shaping the societal body through technical systems, staging, and institutional arrangements. Once the societal body is composed rather than given, democracy becomes a material to be handled and formed anew.

• It inherits its name from Joseph Beuys's social sculpture (Soziale Plastik) — but through a narrow channel: his repeated formation of political organisation, e.g. the German Student Party (1967), its office inside the Düsseldorf Art Academy (Ursprung 2021).
• With Krauss, I define sculpture through «logical operations on a set of cultural terms» — an expanded but finite set — so the category does not dissolve into a universal continuum (Krauss 1979).

Command and answer

• AI itself becomes a sculptural material. The question: what form does technosocial sculpture take once infrastructures built to sort people begin to address them?
• And what prior logics of command and answer — golem, robot, bomb — do they carry into that address? «The machine is the modern counterpart of the Golem of the Rabbi of Prague» (Wiener 1964: 94).
• The shift the dissertation tracks is from commandability (an instrument obeys) to answerability (a respondent can be held to account).

In September 2025, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama introduced Diella, an AI avatar from the e-Albania portal, to oversee public procurement (AP 2025).

• Rama is also a painter — former rector of Albania's National Academy of Arts — who staged Diella's parliamentary debut on large screens before the national assembly.
• As the constitution requires a minister eligible to serve as a deputy, Diella had to appear ministerial without fully occupying the office whose grammar she invoked; power was routed through the prime minister's authority — faintly golemic, made to answer without being answerable (Démas & Perez 2025).

In 2000, Wiktoria Cukt ran for president of Poland against Aleksander Kwaśniewski — created by the collective C.U.K.T. under the slogan «the obsolescence of politicians» (Ujazdowski Castle 2025).

• Her programme: «elimination of human factors from decision-making processes» and «electronic direct democracy», via Civic Electoral Software.
• The point: to let the candidate's position be composed from public input — if users answered from the left, she answered from the left; if contradictory, she mirrored contradiction.
• Her slogan «the obsolescence of politicians» derives from Stanisław Lem (Lem 2013). From 2024, Wyrzykowski and I reactivated her through AI, alongside Leader Lars.

Three failures, dramatised

• The scalar trap — democracy appended as a number to be maximised. Treat it as a scalar objective and you optimise the life out of it.
• Safety-as-sovereignty — maximise habitability and you license the safety-maximising authoritarian: ever-safer rule, ever-less politics.
• No Proust, yes potholes — a governance that cannot render the future fills it with maintenance. Rigid ordering, applied to a world that refuses fixed rules, produces the political material from which democracy is made.

At Kunstraum MEMPHIS in Linz (2026), KI-DIPFIES functioned as a control interface for swarm-based party formation.

• It drew on the fictional newspaper curmudgeon Vitus Mostdipf as a vernacular character, urging visitors to build a local party (Mostdipf 2024).
• A swarm of synthetic political personas enacts the constraint specification «as a self-modifying sculpture» (Staunæs 2026b).
• It is an interactive text dungeon: timelines run by branching vectors — forward, backward, heckle — each branch a candidate governance algorithm tested against Habitability, Contestability, and Extension (Fig 6).

My claim is not that elections, parties, and law disappear, but that they no longer exhaust the control surface of collective life once models, scores, and pipelines decide.

• The governance algorithm itself crashes — «Algorithmic Democracy, 2.0» re-constitutes from the wreckage.
• Democracy becomes a generative grammar: a code to be inscribed where society is actively being organised, testing existing forms of algorithmic democracy and widening what is representable.

A geometry built for orientation cannot proliferate indefinitely. At some point it must stop expanding and start exposing. Let us therefore open the geometry as a box.

• The figure in the party uniform is me. What I recognise is not myself as bearer of practice, but my position relative to the permutation that Computer Lars names — and the way it resists collapse into a biography.
• I theorise as Asker Bryld Staunæs but practise under mandate from Computer Lars — an open signature and anagram of Marcel Proust.

Across Computer Lars's meta-positions — curator, party secretary, researcher, cardboard effigy, anagram — the inquiry risks the charge of diffusing responsibility through the fictionality of an art exhibition (Staunæs 2026: 112).

Günther Anders read the nuclear bomb as a robotic arrangement — a chain so composed of partial actions that «in the end, nobody would have done it» (Anders 2025: 211).

• «oracle machines, automatic electronic consciences» are built «to which responsibility can now be delegated,» while «humans stand by … washing their hands in innocence» (Anders 2025: 211).
• AI's architects now cast democracy as the form meant to govern catastrophic scale: a nuclear precedent, «something like an IAEA» (Altman, Brockman & Sutskever 2023).

«Democratic safeguarding is how the bomb survives its detonation» (Staunæs 2026: 97). My framing diverges: the synthetic is morphologically generative.

The title Syntheticism: How I Learned to Love Democracy compresses Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick 1964) — released the year Lem published Summa Technologiae (Lem 2013).

• Kubrick names the primary target Laputa, after Swift's floating island of abstract theorists, suspended above the ground it governs (Swift 2004: 220).
• Below it, in Lagado, the Grand Academy houses the Engine — Swift's device for generating text by the permutation of inscribed cubes, «a combinatorial precursor of the punch-card» (Swift 2004: 241).

How I learned to love democracy was not through renewed civic faith or affective reconciliation.

I acquired a machine-learned love, trained on the disproportion between response and responsibility rather than on any native sentiment toward popular rule. I learned to love at the level where political form currently takes shape — which means as a robot feeding answers into the response-stream that already runs.

So how did I learn to stop worrying and love democracy? Too late, from inside, and without anywhere else to stand.

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Democracy

I remained in its blast radius long enough to let it flatten and extend me, to accompany the robots there, and to feed new forms of answerability back into the response-stream.