2017
Custom generative adversarial neural network, transfer print on mylar (1200mm x 1200mm), LED floodlight

Two artificial intelligences play a game with almost three-thousand images of predatory animals in order to find what patterns emerge. Taking a walk in the so-called lateral space of the resulting neural network, the hazy visage of a jaguar appears.

But the human eye perhaps finds itself in a moment of misapprehension. The machine constructs the image and we construct another image out of what we think we are seeing. Our own capacity for false beliefs: evolutionarily, if we perceived a predator, we had to act as if it is actually there.

Is this superstition, then? Or proof of Dennett's Criterion which states that any object is just a pattern—real in its own right.

Images
Exhibition view Spacewalk: Carnivores 3, Generation 480 at Dusty Selva, Centro de las Artes de San Agustín, Oaxaca, MX
Spacewalk: Carnivores 3 (process image)
Spacewalk: Carnivores 3, Generation 320
Spacewalk: Carnivores 3, Generation 520
Spacewalk: Carnivores 3, Generation 480

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Deep Unlearning (I)

February 24, 2018, 5:47 am

≫ Next: Declimatize

≪ Previous: Spacewalk

2018
Custom card game, 4K video
In collaboration with Chris Woebken

In the presence of learning machines, human knowledge of the Western kind has become one among many. Non-human creativity emerging from many substrates and its application in time are likely to produce realities so complex and alien that we may never fully understand them.

Here, games play an important role, not only as benchmarks for intelligence, but also as a common platform on which those synthetic minds can be directly encountered. In response to this, we propose a process of deep unlearning, a playful self-alienation in order to gain a tiny measure of access to the ways of knowledge of the not-us.

For the first stage of this project we have designed a card game which by self-randomization through shuffling allows for the creation of almost 3 billion possible algorithmic instructions, not unlike the instruction pieces of the Fluxus era. A certain measure of nonsensicality is expected, as it is at precisely this boundary where unlearning takes place and irrational meaning may emerge.

Project website: deepunlearning.schloss-post.com

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Declimatize

July 24, 2018, 9:11 pm

≫ Next: 1948 Unbound: Chance

≪ Previous: Deep Unlearning (I)

2018
Long-term botanical installation, 5m x 5m
In collaboration with Chris Woebken

Throughout the colonial history of plants, thousands of species were transposed from tropical climates to more temperate ones, often with the goal of making them viable within the agricultural industries of northern Europe. Islands like the Azores with their mild temperatures and high precipitation rate played a crucial role as open air laboratories, where in private “acclimatization gardens” botanists were attempting to slowly coax organisms into thriving in different environments—experiments which mostly failed.

Now, under the effects of anthropogenic climate change, it could be claimed that islands themselves are thrown into motion, uncertain trajectories at the end of which local weather patterns may resemble a different geographical location altogether. In response, we propose a garden of “declimatization” that combines the research and knowledge of climatologists, conservationists, gardeners and historians and takes as a departure point the best available simulation model1 for São Miguel Island.

Set in the public Parque Urbano de Ponta Delgada, Declimatize was created as a long-term installation that provides an ecological interface to a number of species likely to thrive in the local conditions described by the simulation for the year 2100. As it approaches, the installation is bound to gradually become reality while at the same time turning into a ruin of the simulation’s inevitable mispredictions, visitable just like São Miguel’s eighteenth century botanical gardens today.

Created for Walk & Talk 2018, curated by Dani Admiss, special thanks to: Isabel Albergaria (University of the Azores), Gonçalo Branco, Luís Brum, Diogo Jácome Correia, Filipe Figueiredo & SPEA and Pedro M.A. de Miranda (University of Lisbon).

1 Tomé, Ricardo F.D., Mudanças Climáticas Nas Regiões Insulares, Universidade dos Açores, Departamento de Ciências Agrárias, 2013. Forced by a RCP8.5 scenario, employing the EC-Earth model and others.

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1948 Unbound: Chance

July 24, 2018, 11:10 pm

≫ Next: Export to World

≪ Previous: Declimatize

2017
Curatorial project with the House of World Cultures (HKW), Berlin

Human culture has been a culture of chance all along. Practices of divination have served as buffers between human societies and their ecosystems for millennia, using predictive and even divinatory methods for food cultivation and navigation. Around 1948, a new configuration of chance practices becomes operative with the establishment of game theory, computer simulations, and scenario planning. Ever since then, high-quality (pseudo-)random numbers have become indispensable for simulating the design of nuclear weapons, calculating the future of human populations, and modeling the climate.

How do we recognize the differences or similarities of these two forms of employing chance tools for making predictions? Embracing chance and its phenomena, its materials, and rituals, this session aims to explore a lesser known but crucial element of the technosphere, concluding with a speculative dream of a future in which we, in 2017, are already history.

Visual design by Tea Palmelund. Programmed by Archive Studio, London.

With (in order of appearance) Katrina Burch aka Yoneda Lemma, Giuseppe Longo, Inigo Wilkins, Josh Berson, Seth Bullock, Nahum, Helena Shomar, Elena Esposito, Benjamin H. Bratton, Luis Campos, Elena Esposito, Alexander R. Galloway, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, and Orit Halpern.

Videos by David San Millán/HKW, photos by Joachim Dette/HKW

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Export to World

August 1, 2019, 5:03 am

≫ Next: Forever Future

≪ Previous: 1948 Unbound: Chance

2007
Paper (various dimensions)
In collaboration with Linda Kostowski

Export to World aims to ‘steal’ items from walled economies of simulated scarcity, seeking to ironically comment on the design and production of commodities in virtual universes.

We export objects into the real world by transforming them into life-size papercraft models leading to paper representations of digital representations of real objects, bearing all the flaws that copying entails.

The true collision of worlds, however, occurs in photos. The exported items have a bizarre, almost manipulated appearance. We tend to attribute this to the loop they have passed through – from real object to virtual representation back to real object.

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Forever Future

August 1, 2019, 5:03 am

≫ Next: Manifold Natures

≪ Previous: Export to World

2010
HD video (4:24 min)

What happens to technological visions when they do not come true? Do they just disappear or is there a place where they live on until they eventually may be materialized? Or are there phantom futures that might forever stay at a certain distance from us and can we even feel nostalgia for them?

Robert Walker is a fictitious character who remembers the visions of space that dominated the American public imagination until well into the 1980s. He expected to follow the Voyager probes into the unknown and spend part of his life in space. Fifteen years later, he realized that this future is unlikely to happen and he started a space program of his own. He starts to collects technological predictions that had been made for the present year and conserves the ones that didn't come true. In an annual ritual that mimics the trip to one of envisioned space colonies, he visits a storage facility in which he keeps his 'ship', a semi-autonomous archive that will travel through time until it gets recovered and the mission ends.

Played by Martin Marlow, Walker explores the psychological effects of technological promises, many of which are bound to not, at least immediately, materialize. Like many of the early pioneers of a new technologies, in his mind the lines between scientific thinking and fiction are not as clearly drawn. What underlies his imaginary space ship, however, is the realization that narratives of the future in every form are an integral part of what scholar Norman M. Klein calls 'fantastic infrastructure' and therefore is as important as every other resource at our disposal.

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