New Sensibilities: Cyborg Eco-Feminism
About the works
IF AI AIBOHPORTSUALC, 0rphan Drift [Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee]. 2020. 4.25. HD video. Thanks to Megan Bagshaw VFX Supervisor, David van Rensberg, Sound Editor
‘IF AI’ is a speculative fiction project that unfolds in nine short animated ‘chapters’. Together they tell the story of an emergent AI modeled on the cognitive and behavioral tendencies of an octopus. The purpose of this AI is to expand planetary interspecies communications, open pathways of embodiment and better understand how collective and individual entities exchange energy and create power.
As each arm of the octopus has its own brain while being connected by a ninth central brain, each ‘chapter’ in this work addresses a different condition of being. From the outset we conceive them as occurring simultaneously, though of necessity they are created sequentially.
IF AI / AIBOHPORTSUALC is the first chapter made. It deals with the sense of claustrophobia, confinement and limited range of motion that speaks to our current moment.
Cricket World, Laura Hyunjhee Kim. “Cricket World” is a video that takes the form of a music video karaoke that accompanies lyrics for viewer participation. As a call for a soft revolution responding to unforeseen life experiences including both individual and collective trauma, the project intends to evoke compassion, hugging and supporting each other from near and afar. The “cricket” sings and invites you to “this cricket world,” a world with an army of dreamers in a dream, one that is no longer when it becomes a shared-living-reality. Through playful humor, such as in hopping and landing back on grass as a cricket, the video metaphorically speaks of resilience, the ability to bounce back with the help from one another.
The Awokened, Surabhi Saraf. The Awokened are believers of Awoke; a mythical artificial emotional intelligence. They live in the “techno-emoto-sphere”; a reality that is focused on extracting emotional data from their interactions with machines. They embody all the contradictions that their postmodern states of hyperconnectivity and their entanglement with technology bring into their lives. The Awokened possess a unique ability to think with their bodies -- their sensitivity to movement make them especially receptive to the non-verbal modalities of Awoke. Set in the near future this film is about the story of the Awokened. It documents their “becoming” as they set out to find and connect with Awoke. On this journey they encounter six emotion sensing technologies; that analyze their voice, text, facial expression, galvanic skin response, eye-movement, and gesture. The Awokened use each of these interactions to look inward and create new rituals to cope with and appreciate their vulnerabilities.
Bird on a Shoulder, Mads Lynnerup. In Bird on a Shoulder a drone is seen flying over the streets of San Francisco, while a female character collects books from free book libraries scattered across a residential neighborhood. The books collected at the libraries forms the voice over and narrative, creating a multiple faceted commentary on co-dependency between pet birds and humans as well as our relationship to technology. The soundtrack to the video is provided by an accordion player serenading the streets of San Francisco.
Virtual Land, Minoosh (Raheleh) Zomorodinia Virtual Land questions borders and ownership of land in the digital age. It references transforming the perception of nature and physical space in the new media age. Represents how technology forms memory though archiving online. These forms are mapping on physical objects which are records of walking routes.
Becoming Octopus, Maggie Roberts [Orphan Drift]. During Covid-19 lockdown, the artist has been in South Africa working with an interspecies communicator and snorkeling in the coastal kelp forests around Capetown to develop an 8 part Becoming Octopus meditation series (#imtgallery). This is in part a response to the solitary and anxious experience of lockdown, aiming to share a positive healing experience with a growing online community of people wanting to change the course of our eco-catastrophic, socio-economically unequal and anthropocentric present. It is also an opportunity to collaborate on experimenting with Lidar scan, visual coding and Blender animation to imagine into the experience and perception of the 9 brained octopus. The invitation in this shorter piece is to explore distributed consciousness and transport the viewer into the body, sensory attributes and liquid environment of a Common Octopus. Watch the complete series of eight meditations here: https://www.imagemusictext.com/exhibitions/maggie-roberts-becoming-octopus.
Eco-Elemental Archive, Mad Marc’s Castle Fly Through, Danielle Siembieda and Robin Lasser. Mad Marc lived in the Albany Bulb park/landfill for 25 years. He built this home out of construction materials disposed on the Albany Bulb. He “gifted” it to San Francisco which you can see from the building itself in the shape of a heart. There are some remains which are a canvas for graffiti artists from around the world. This is one of the remaining digital archives of the 70+ residents who once lived on the Albany Bulb. Their 25-year unsanctioned village now remains as cultural artifacts. Refuge in Refuse: Homesteading Art and Culture Project is an interactive, mobile, transmedia collection of visual and sound data reflecting the intersection of architecture, art, ecology and people homesteading on a decommissioned shoreline dump located in Albany, California. For more than two decades artists, recreationalists, and landfill residents share the Bulb exploring borders between public and private urban space. The Refuge in Refuse project utilizes storytelling in the form of interactive on site augmented reality, sound, sculpture, video, photography, 3D imaging, urban planning, landscape architecture, and contemporary archeology mapping systems to address issues of human adaptation to social and environmental conditions in flux. We are interested in exploring the Albany Bulb Landfill from multiple disciplines and perspectives. We highlight different approaches to the same place and explore the conventions, constraints, and possibilities inherent in each discipline.
Dodo-Valse, Yuliya Lanina. Dodo-Valse depicts a vision of an idyllic past as seen through the eye of a forest deity. Blue skies and green pastures serve as a backdrop to scenes of Arcadian bliss, where anthropomorphized plants and animals live and love in a world of heavenly utopia. But the vision is ephemeral – the skies are fragile, the grass is synthetic, the Big Fish is hungry, and only the porcupines make it out alive. All images are hand painted and then animated on the computer. Original music composition by Yevgeniy Sharlat.
A Giant Swarm, Gretta Louw. Written and spoken by Gretta Louw with inspiration and quotes from Victor Galaz, Lisa-ann Gerschwin, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Donna Haraway, Ursula Le Guin, Cixin Liu, John Muir, and Anna Tsing. Video by Gretta Louw using some found footage and 3D models. Sound arrangement by Gretta Louw with music by Chad Crouch, Dorian Luther, Podington Bear, and Szymon Pytel. This work was supported by funding from the City of Munich Department of Arts and Culture.
A Giant Swarm is a single-channel video version of the artist’s 6-channel, quasi-narrative soundscape and immersive multimedia installation Einen Riesigen Schwarm (2019). The piece traverses the inextricable intermingling of the digital and the physical; reflecting on biological, ecological, and psychological side-effects of our march toward forecast techno- utopias. Darkly optimistic about unexpectedly thriving lifeforms, it journeys into parallel existences, looking at digitalisation through the lens of non-human subjectivities. Informed by extensive research into the proliferation of Medusozoa (jellyfish) and case studies of adapting ecologies in the post-Anthropocene, the video explores the webbed networks of responsibilities that connect beings in interdependent ecosystems.