blanche the vidiot: AIcology - 2020

Szabina Péter – Kristóf János Bodnár: AIcology

In our project we aim to map and present relations – within and between systems: living and ‘artificial’, organic and organized, relational and recursive ones. Ecology being the terrain of relations and interactions between organisms and systems – living and inorganic alike –, we are focusing on artificial intelligences’ ecologies, in multiple senses:

First and foremost – in the vein of William Gibson’s famous insight on the dubiousness whether our grandchildren will understand the distinction between things that are computing machines and which are not, and in line with the Kittlerian apprehension of the medial determinants’ (or technical a prioris’) role in any relation towards ourselves and the nature – we are after how AIs are shaping the very notion of ecology and allow for possibilities of discourses with media/art.

Relying on Kittler’s vision that we’re heading towards a future in which the difference between the ‘artificial’ and the ‘natural’ will be artificial itself (because the nature, potentially all ecosystems themselves will become interfaces), AIcology tries to articulate by means of media/art our need to reflect on the “schematism of perceivability” brought about by the different AIs – from ‘basic’ ones such as sensors, DSP chains to much more ‘advanced’ ones like Google’s Deep Dream.

AIs’ ecology in this schematic sense is examined in our work by audiovisually and conceptually relating and (re)connecting different DSP’s (movie camera, field recorder) and AI’s (Deep Dream, Alexa) to themselves and to each other via different mechanisms: mixed media video loop, recursive feedback in pattern recognition and generation.

Put bluntly, we are asking some basic questions of the media-art/AI/ecology triangle: How does the AI see the world (and thus, since all medium is now immersed by DSP’s, how we are able to see it), itself, themselves – and us, maybe still being able to see them seeing? What sort of ecologies these strange loops invite us towards?