CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Rolando Gonzales Martinez Epistemologies of Rebellion: Bayesian Post-Anarchist Science for Pre-Apocalyptic Worlds

This project proposes a program for a post-anarchist, post-quantitative epistemology of science for pre-apocalyptic worlds. Contemporary scientific practice is increasingly shaped by AI-generated research, predatory publishing, commodity-driven and corporate science, and the colonial capture of methods and goals. Together, these forces impose rigid epistemic molds that constrain both subjects and worlds. Building on Feyerabend’s epistemological pluralism and Deleuze’s concepts of assemblage and multiplicity, this CAPAS project reframes science as a collective act of rebellion against the institutions and power structures precipitating the end(s) of the world.

Methodologically, the project replaces the qualitative–quantitative divide with a Bayesian continuum. Historically situated subjectivities are formalized as priors, elicited from interviews, archives, and community testimony; measurements contribute likelihoods; and posteriors emerge as negotiated, auditable artifacts that sustain action under conditions of radical uncertainty. Pluralism is operationalized through hierarchical and nonparametric structures that preserve local knowledge, posterior mixing strategies that protect minority models, and decision-theoretic layers that encode community utilities and inequity-sensitive loss functions. Artificial intelligence is explicitly constrained to a co-creative role: assembling collective priors, visualizing epistemic dissent, and tracing inferential pathways, but never operating as a sovereign decision-maker. An artistic component stages prior contests and posterior transformations, rendering epistemic change phenomenologically and materially graspable.

Deliverables include a theoretical blueprint, an open-source Bayesian Rhizomatic Toolkit, and a public installation. The project ultimately reasserts science as a mode of insurgency—an experimental, collective practice oriented against the systems of control and oppression that structure the pre-apocalyptic world.

See Rolando Martinez's profile