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“If a human–pig chimera were brought to term, should we treat it like a pig, like a human, or like something else altogether?”
– Bioethics researcher
Julian Koplin , extrapolating a moral quandary raised by
embryonic stem cell research that blurs the line between human and animal. With research into synthetic embryos and lab-grown biocomputers underway, Koplin underscores that “we are creating entities that are neither one thing nor the other,” and that reflection on the moral status of these hybrids is needed.
Anicka Yi ’s solo exhibition “A Shimmer Through The Quantum Foam” opens at Esther Schipper, Berlin, evolving the Korean-American artist’s notion of the “biologized machine” with new works. Visitors enter a hybrid ecosystem of fleshy landscapes created with machine learning models and suspended luminescent pods resembling Radiolaria . As the soft glow of an aqueous ooze—indicative of life’s marine origins—sprawls across the gallery floor, a custom-made scent by perfumer Barnabé Fillion fills the air.
The Hole’s yearly thematic group show, “Fembot,” opens at the New York gallery’s Bowery location, celebrating technology and the female form. “Representations of the female body are as vast as the internet, from futuristic robots to porous, sweaty flesh,” writes gallerist Kathy Grayson about the works of Salomé Chatrior , Auriea Harvey , Jordan Homstad , Faith Holland , Nicole Ruggiero , and others that range from “cyborg goddesses” to post-human grotesques. Case in point: CGI artist Emma Stern ’s 3d-printed ‘amphemme’ Brooke (2023, image).
“Maybe we can’t literally taste new technologies, but we do metabolize them through our bodies—our senses, nervous systems, psychologies, and undoubtedly our appetites.”
– Writer
Michelle Santiago Cortés , musing over embodied and visceral responses to emerging technology. Surveying discussions about how AI is ‘eating everything’ to the revulsion accompanying an
uncanny valley encounter, Cortés considers how new technology “reaches deep into our stomachs and twists our judgment.”
The Wignall Museum in Rancho Cucamonga (US) opens “Seeing the Unseen: Science + Art,” a group exhibition squarely focused on disciplinary entanglements and artists “engaged in new methods of scientific research” including David Bowen , Hannah Chalew , Maru Garcia , Lia Halloran , Elizabeth Hénaff , and Laura Splan . Splan’s Tangible Variations Flatiron Institute , New York.
OUT NOW :
Tamara Kneese
Death Glitch
Tech ethnographer
Kneese draws on interviews with digital afterlife startups, chronic illness bloggers, and transhumanist tinkerers to explore how platform capitalism shapes our perception of mortality.
“This is an unprecedented escalation by a social media company against independent researchers. Musk has just declared open war. If he succeeds in silencing us other researchers will be next in line.”
–
Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) Founder and CEO Imran Ahmed, in response to X, formerly Twitter, threatening legal action over the nonprofit’s research into content moderation. The organization had critized Musk’s leadership for the increase in anti-LGBTQ hate speech and climate misinformation.
“I would like the body to be an open system, one that is exposed and fragile.”
– South Korean artist
Yein Lee , on her figurative sculptures, which assemble evocative cyborg-like bodies and organs from technological refuse (image:
status for the time being , 2023)
“Perhaps compassion simply needs to be performed, the healthcare provider must be seen to be sympathetic to relieve the patient.”
– Art writer Angeria Rigamonti di Cutò, reflecting on AI’s capacity for emotional labour after encountering
Sofie Layton ’s
Does AI Care? (2023). Inspired by how the audio piece draws on cancer patient and oncologist consultation to ‘perform’ empathy, di Cutò uses part of her review of Science Gallery London’s “
AI: WHO’S LOOKING AFTER ME? ” to imagine a near future where AI offers healthcare workers support to (better) tend to patients’ emotional needs.
“On the whole, despite the ‘dystopian vibez’ of staring into an orb and letting it scan deeply into your eyeballs, it does seem like specialized hardware systems can do quite a decent job of protecting privacy.”
– Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, assessing
Tools for Humanity ’s plan to confirm proof-of-personhood for the global populace by scanning their irises for the
Worldcoin project. While he concedes it will probably be necessary to distinguish humans from AI soon, Buterin warns of the triple threat of security vulnerabilities, identity black markets, and overly-centralized hardware.
Worldcoin, a proof-of-personhood digital identity system for a future full of AI agents, launches. A Tools for Humanity (OpenAI’s Sam Altman and engineer Alex Blania) initiative, it proposes iris scanning everyone on earth to assign them an anonymized biometric identity—and a related cryptocurrency. Anticipating AI-induced cultural shifts, Altman & Blania claim Worldcoin will let users “prove you are a real and unique person online” and assist in universal basic income (UBI) disbursement.
“Moving as half-human half-machine, we enter the stage like Terminator robots hyping the crowd with claims of world domination,” Mary Maggic recalls opening “Climate Fitness ” at Intermediae Matadero Madrid. Faster Higher Stronger (2022), a cross-species performance and installation, had Maggic and collaborators ride bicycle-powered bioreactors. “In the background, SCOBY flesh spins with us, synchronized to the tune of optimized aesthetics,” she writes. “The crowd films through their phones, peering like voyeurs into a mirror of their own reality.”
“If we lift these disciplinary silos, then what we are left with are daring imaginations and skills, coupled with the profound knowledge that we are mired in layers of false assumptions.”
– Korean-American artist
Anicka Yi , taking on the “the impossible task of debunking the favourite Western notion: the autonomous self” with her newly-hatched nomadic research initiative
Metaspore . Speaking at NEW INC
DEMO2023 , Yi reveals the project as a “deeply personal transformation” in search of more sustainable meaning that seeks to “generate interdisciplinary spores of social trust and action.”
“Projects such as Aadhaar propose a distinction between ‘identity and identification’—the former an amalgamation of social relations and historical processes, and the latter touted as a neutral act of correlating one piece of information to another.”
– Indian writer
Arushi Vats , framing the
Aadhaar biometric ID system. Drawing from her biography and critical theory, Vats ruminates on
living with and
resisting the 12-digit unique identity number assigned to every Indian citizen.
Faith Holland ’s solo exhibition “Death Drive” opens at Microscope, New York, featuring new sculptures, videos, and digital prints that examine technological decay. In the series Death Doula (2023, image), for example, broken laptops, tablets, and smartphones become mycelium habitats that the New York-based artist, in the feminist tradition of the studio kitchen, cultivated in her home refrigerator. Over time, the molds will grow, shape colour, and, Holland muses, may help deteriorate hardware that takes eons to decompose.
“What surprised us was that the majority of species that are traded on the dark web are for their recreational drug properties, particularly for psychoactive compounds. People trade these to essentially lick them.”
– University of Adelaide ecologist
Phill Cassey , on the booming illegal wildlife trade on darknet markets. In a
new paper , Cassey and team identified 153 different species on offer, many of them with known drug properties. The toxic glands of the advertized Sonoran desert toad (
Incilius alvarius ), for example, contain the psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT.
OUT NOW :
James E. Dobson
The Birth of Computer Vision
Providing a “genealogy of image-recognition techniques and technologies,” cultural critic
Dobson reveals the Cold War origins and enduring biases that continue to shape automated perception.
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