Mythless Technological Obduracy — Visions Beyond Human: Animal and Machine Perception in the Art of Orphan Drift.
Introduction
Donna Haraway’s 1988 article Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective mentions a figure from Native American mythology of the Southwest, the Trickster Coyote. Not entirely unrelated to the following discourse, she claims this myth is useful for scientists. Haraway employs this mythical figure as a point of departure from empirical subjective knowledge. Such a perspective of objectivity makes room for surprises and ironies at the heart of all knowledge production. In the same vein, Haraway claims that moral and political discourse should be the paradigm for rational discourse about the imagery and technologies of vision. Overall, Haraway is arguing that situated and embodied knowledge opposes phallogocentrism. Mythical and indigenous knowledge are embodied forms of knowledge. Thus, whom and what is objectified by the empirical sciences is granted a status of actor and agent in creating knowledge. Haraway returns to the mythic Coyote to represent the material world as an always problematic and potent tie between meanings and bodies. The above-mentioned serves as a line of sight for the artwork and contingent issues discussed here. The following is a structuralist and mythological turn in digital-posthumanist criticality concerning the work of the avatar artist collective Orphan Drift. As a mode of analysis and interpretation, indigenous knowledge
systems superimpose across experiments of the artist, machine, and animal interactions. The analysis and interpretation here view Orphan Drift and Etic Labs’ project, Interspecies Communication Research Initiative, critically as extended surrogacies of the burden of creative labor through technologically mediated artwork.
Orphan Drift, Etic Labs, and the Interspecies Communication Research Initiative
Ranu Mukhergee and Maggie Roberts form Orphan Drift. Their latest project trains an octopus to use AI to make art and co-create a new visual language to describe the human-animal-machine relationship. Orphan Drift (OD) began in 1994 using technology to create artworks to speak against patriarchal systems in both the art and technological worlds. Their most recent body of work engages integrations of machine-animal vision. In collaboration with Etic Labs, OD is in the process of engineering a mutual learning environment where Ai and Octopuses reflexively respond to each other, effectively facilitating machine animal communication. The goal is the creation of a video stream generated by AI, which is re-programmed by the octopus responses. This experiment is aided by lidar scan animators, a VFX supervisor, and a computational arts coder. According to Etic Labs, the project explores the boundaries of a machine and human vision through iterative processing to facilitate a different intelligence model, an extended intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. The potential of ISCRI is the creation of alternative forms of experience, perception, ethics, and entanglement revealed in the process of “stripping away the human tendency to deploy anthropomorphism, to ‘see’ another form of intelligent life.” ISCRI seeks to answer the question of what potential may lie in AI to “process uncertainty and changing, dynamic environments through engagement with distributed consciousness.” The hope is that this experiment will resist AI’s current evolution track as a surveilling and predictive modeling tool rooted in the human desire for profit, control, and security.
Sophisticated machine-learning algorithms are, by some accounts, a new agent of reality formation and individualized identity construction. Etic Lab, a technology firm that aids artists in realizing projects like ISCRI, claims so-called Guru Codes can responsibly alter or reify subjective realities through their entanglement with human users. New emergent behaviors are developing continuously through this specifically morphogenic interaction between humans and machines. This level of behavioral evolution, both on humans and machines, precedes metamorphosis. By some accounts, these are patterns followed by living organisms. With this understanding, technologist Kevin Kelly bases his claim that technology is an extropic system
that originated from animals, one of the six kingdoms of life. In addition to the kingdoms archaebacteria, eubacteria, protists, fungi, Plantae, and Animalia, the technium is now the seventh kingdom of life. From this perception of technology, projects like Orphan Drift’s If AI were a Cephalopod are being conceived. The rise of astonishingly powerful technological developments on the implementation and use of AI raises fundamental questions about what human life is and what humanity is capable of. Because they operate in a space broad enough to engage questions of this magnitude on their terms, artists can hold a mirror up to the issues surrounding the now transcendent role AI plays in our lives.
Art, Animals, Mythology, and Technology
Letter IX of Sir David Brewster’s 1842 book, Letters On Natural Magic, is Automata of the Ancients. The letter begins with Homer’s account of Vulcan’s tripods, autonomously moving furniture, animals, and human-like machines. His detailed versions of automatons imitate living creatures operated through mechanical means, but others reportedly were driven by an aura or a spirit. He concludes his letter to Sir Walter Scott with a detailed account of Mr. Charles Babbage’s calculating machine, the world’s first computer, from 1821. In the span of two hundred years, human-machine interaction has led to a nearly total world transformation.
The incorporation of living animals in artwork can be found as far back as a performance, entitled I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), by the visionary German artist Joseph Beuys. In a room in West Broadway’s René Block Gallery, Beuys shared this solitary space with a coyote — a wild beast, often considered to represent America’s untamed spirit — for three days. Beuys, who claimed his art was a kind of shamanistic practice, sought to gain unique knowledge from his performance. It is argued here that artwork like Beuys and ISCRI indicates a return to mythic thought in both creative and technological culture. Still practiced by indigenous peoples and found throughout mythologies across history, animals are observed to gain insights, vision, and intelligence beyond the human sensorium. ISCRI signals a return to mythological technology, culture, and arts through artificial intelligence as a kind of oracle. Orphan Drift seeks to create new knowledge derived from beyond-human others, and the octopus serves as their animal totem.
Unequivocally, mythology and technology are held on the same horizon as art and culture; each imparts influence on one another. According to Levi-Strauss, mythology is created from a set of problems a culture faces. When paired against each other and seen in reference to each other, these covalent problems form systems. This same reasoning is now forming technologically mythical thought. In this way, artificial intelligence is a zoeme, an animal that is given semantic functions.
Zoemes allow mythic thought to keep its operations within the same framework. The people who settled the two Americas in a series of migratory waves consciously or unconsciously looked for species, genera, or families presenting some analogies to the ones they were familiar with in other regions; if they failed to find any, they look for creatures they could substitute for those missing in their new environment and integrated them in their myths without altering the initial network of relations. [The Jealous Potter 97]
This assertion is rooted in the premise that AI has existed long before computers. In the forms of divination and mysticism through totems and oracles. Dialectically, this ontological structuring of techo-mythology leads to the following assertion. If technology is applied to maintain certain social organizations, then mythology can divert certain future cultural organizations. Namely, the culture of extraction, colonization, and domination of animals, humans, and the natural world. Developing technological narratives gives us a unique mirror with which to examine our own values.[Zhang 36]
Proxies and Surrogates of the Burden of Creativity
This section concerns topics that surround technology as it advances in our culture, specifically regarding machines and how they relate to humanity and human bodies. The machine body and the human body have been interacting and are now merging into one body. Machines have provided surrogate labor and subjugated and colonized humans, and machines are now providing surrogacy of creative burden and proxy extensions of our bodies. In his contribution to Proxy Politics: Power and Subversion in a Networked Age, Nick Houde thinks surrogacy carries another’s productive burden, and as the general model of technology we have today. Here is the basis for the critical analysis of ISCRI’s experimentations with animal-machine vision. Although rife with the potential to create new visions and understanding for the future of AI, without extricating the logic of the conscripted roles of sentient machines and animals for creative servitude, ISCRI risks perpetuating persistent cultures of dominance rather than that of kinship.
Donna Haraway, Situated Knowleges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988, pp 575–599.
Etic Lab, “ISCRI: An AI Programmed By An Octopus.”
Etic Lab, “KRAKEN: Communicating with an Inhuman Intelligence.”
Genevieve Quick, Artforum , https:www.artforum.com/picks/0rphan-drift-79896.
Etic Lab, “The Guru Code: Algorithmic Reality.
Sofian Audry, “Behavior Morpholoiges of Machine Learning in Media Artworks,” Leonardo.
Edge.com, “The Technium and the Seventh Kingdom of Life.”
World Economic Forum, “AI Governance A Holistic Approach to Implement Ethics into AI.”
Etic Lab, “On the Cruelty of Computational Reseaning.”
Peter Yeung, “JOSEPH BEUYS: I LIKE AMERICA AND AMERICA LIKES ME.”
Claude Levi-Straus, “The Jealous Potter.”
Johanna Hedva, https://glut.website.
Snoweria Zhang, The wicked Queen’s Smart Mirror
