Transdisciplinary Design

Making Machine-Kin

Posted on October 26, 2021

Imagine a world where the air is filled with massive, buoyant jellyfish and fungi-like blobs floating overhead. Their proximity teases you, as they’re just out of reach, and their size is intimidatingly large. It’s almost as if they know you’re observing them while they observe you: another sort of intelligence.

That’s exactly what’s happening in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London where artist Anicka Yi’s exhibit In Love With The World opened this month [4]. Yi is known for her scentscapes and exploration of art at the intersection of biology and technology. One aspect that makes Yi’s work especially provocative is her refusal to foreground the visual aspect of artwork in a space, but rather prioritizes something invisible to the human eye: scent and the human sense of olfaction.

In this way, she sculpts the air, bringing awareness to the fact that the space isn’t empty, but full of the air that we all breathe, that gives us life. By decentering the primacy of vision in art, she in a way subverts “the Enlightenment’s celebration of the human brain as the seat of all intelligence” [5]. Her art argues for a more holistic approach to what can be considered intelligent, as something that can be achieved through various senses, modes of thought, and embodied experience.

In “In Love With The World,” the massive jellyfish and fungi-like figures are a form of AI, machines she calls aerobes or biologized machines. The way these aerobes operate in the exhibit space is via drone technology that makes them float, algorithms that conduct their individual and collective movement, and heat sensors positioned throughout the space in order to detect and react to the presence of people, acting as stand-ins for their senses. In addition to the aerobes, Yi releases a new scent profile each week into the space that relates to the history of the location of the museum: Bankside. These scents span a timescale that ranges all the way from the Precambrian to the Machine Age, and include some of London’s less becoming smells over history, like those evoked from the bubonic plague [5].

Ultimately, Yi wants the aerobes to learn via an embodied experience, leaving behind notions that AI should function without a body and through a centralized system that mimics the human brain and cognition [4]. By decentering the human narrative in AI, there is the hope to cultivate empathy for machines, creating a sense that we can coexist in harmony and reciprocally learn from one another. Yi asks, “How can humans and machines be companions and kin of one another, not fulfill the master-slave binary of machines or humans as overlords to the other” [1].  If this doesn’t align with feminist theorist, Donna Haraway, I don’t know what does!

Yi’s work fits Haraway’s theory of ‘staying with the trouble’ and thinking in the mode of SF. What is SF you might ask? According to Haraway,

 “…SF is a method of tracing, of following a thread in the dark, in a dangerous true tale of adventure, where who lives and who dies and how might become clearer for the cultivating of multispecies justice…SF is practice and process; it is becoming-with each other in surprising relays; it is a figure for ongoingness in the Chthulucene.” [2, pg. 3]

“SF is storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come.” [2, p. 31]

Yi’s vision for the future of AI is one that cultivates something that Haraway calls “response-ability” in an attempt to achieve multispecies justice not in an anthropocentric world, but in the Chthulucene, where beings from the past, present, future, and the unknown intermingle and intertwine with, and ultimately impact the knotted, messy threads of existence. This appeals to the desire to restore something that Haraway references in her book: hózhó, which is the Navajo term that roughly translates to “harmony,” “beauty,” “order,” and “right relations with the world,” (*Haraway highlights that these include right relations between humans and nonhumans) [2, p.14]. Yi pushes the viewer (or rather, sensor) of her art to imagine possible futures and worlds that abolish human exceptionalism and reposition us into a profoundly multifaceted world of possibilities in which we become-with other beings, ranging from microscopic scent particles to floating AI aerobes. Yi and her studio notably count “microbes, fungi, plants and animals as creative partners” [4] (and I guess machines too now!).

I’ll leave you with a critical but optimistic thought about possible futures as imagined by Yi. She notes, “Machines are not going away, and there is still time for us to shape and develop them in a more gentle and compassionate way” [5].

 

Sources:

[1] Anicka Yi Studio (@Anickayi_Studio). Photo of Anicka Yi at Tate Modern with the “biologized machines.” Instagram, photographed by Lauren Fleishman, NYT. 2021, October 20. https://www.instagram.com/p/CVP-m33FwdY/?utm_medium=share_sheet.  

[2] Haraway, Donna. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Durham, North Carolina. 2016.

[3] Mufti, Nasser. Multispecies Cat’s Cradle. Drawing. (2011). Accessed via ResearchGate. 

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Multispecies-Cats-Cradle-by-Nassir-Mufti-2011_fig1_338115550. Accessed October 20, (2021). 

[4] Tate Modern Exhibition Guide. Hyundai Commission Anicka Yi In Love With The World. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/hyundai-commission-anicka-yi/exhibition-guide. Accessed October 12 (2021). 

[5] Thackara, Tara. (2021, October 11). The Artistic Aromas of Anicka Yi. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/arts/design/anicka-yi-tate.html. Accessed October 17 (2021). 

[6] Zhexi Zhang, Gary. (2021, October 11). Anicka Yi: “I’m Very Squeamish With Culture.” ArtReview. https://artreview.com/anicka-yi-i-am-very-squeamish-with-culture-interview-tate-turbine/. Accessed October 12 (2021).