PRESENTATION: Driving the Human-Seven Prototypes for Eco-Social Renewal

The exhibition “Driving the Human – Seven Prototypes for Eco-Social Renewal” presents seven prototypes at the convergence of art and science, which were created between 2020 and 2022 as research results of the international project »Driving the Human – Seven prototypes for eco-social renewal«. The project was initiated by the Forecast mentoring platform in Berlin with the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG), the ZKM | Karlsruhe and the National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) as partners.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: ZKM Archive

Through an open call, scientists and artists from all over the world were invited to address the question of how all life in the world can be preserved and rethought ecologically and socially. The exhibition shows the seven prototypes of the international scientific-artistic collaboration project »Driving the Human« in correspondence to the exhibition »Renaissance 3.0«, which proposes a base camp for the cooperation of art and science in the 21st century. From June to November, prototypes from »Driving the Human« will be presented in three parts: »Non-Human Perspectives: Sharing, Shaping, Sensing Habitats« (17/6-30/7/2023 ), »Sharing Knowledge on Common Ground« (12/8-24/9/2023) and »Speculative Ecosystems and Interspecies Collaborations« (7/10-26/11/2023). “Monsters and Ghosts of the Far North” searches for an alternative cartography through which we can rethink relationships across species in the Arctic region, and beyond. Points of departure for this project are some of the spatial manifestations of the social, economic, and geopolitical conflicts in the Arctic region caused by environmental degradation. The Arctic is a site of intense geopolitical and infrastructural intrigue, with incompatible and interlocking border claims rooted in colonial and cartographic history. The scientific and cartographic artifacts encountered throughout our research have proven to be flat and exclusive in essence, and they often fail to capture the dynamic nature of the Arctic. Through this project, we question the division of our world and the meaning of current rigid borderlines within distorted, often Eurocentric cartographic projections. Based in Bandung, Western Indonesia, Sedekah Benih researches and documents the traditional ecological knowledge that is passed down in society from generation to generation through art and media. At the root of the project is the belief that traditional knowledge can be learned, developed, and shared to help solve the current problems related to climate change.  Since April 2021, Sedekah Benih has magnified the importance of building bridges between science and society in order to facilitate change. The project has shifted its focus to preparing communities for an exchange of knowledge. Often, there are communication gaps when certain knowledge is introduced to a community; and at the same time, individual communities lack the confidence to interact with people whom they consider more intelligent or powerful. Sedekah Benih aims to strengthen the local culture through a series of initiatives that combine traditional ecological knowledge with other activities that expose individuals to different circles. Sedekah Benih has now evolved into a safe space, encouraging communities of diverse backgrounds to come together in Bandung to share and discuss ideas and know-how. “Virtual Sanctuary for Fertilizing Mourning” was created with the intention of commemorating the deaths of indigenous leaders and environmental activists assassinated in recent years in Peru, while defending their territories from deforestation, mining, and drug trafficking. Over the course of a year and a half, we worked together with their families and communities to create virtual tours of the areas they strove to protect, now hosted in a website called Luto Verde. Every tour is different, trying to reflect each community’s own universe, uniquely shaped by its territory, collective activities, and more-than-human bonds. Oral histories, remembrance, songs, and all the information that the communities found suitable to share, were used to develop portals into ways of life that are now threatened, but also to convey the invisible and affectionate threads sustaining them. The recorded material additionally shows the effects of extractivism and corruption in places where nature is treated merely as an infinite source of resources and profit. Besides the website, Virtual Sanctuary for Fertilizing Mourning is constituted by its research activities, texts about its work with the different communities, sound pieces, drawings, and a site-specific installation at the Berlin venue silent green.

“Do AIs Dream of Climate Chaos-Symbiotic AI” investigates the contradictions in a machine learning system. Given sufficient data, how would AI compute its existence? To reach a general level of intelligence, a system must learn how it is situated in the environment. Though most AI systems manifest as software algorithms, they depend on a ubiquitous hardware infrastructure to exist. Given sufficient data, how would an AI compute its existence? The project simulates an algorithm’s coexistence with the ecosystem around it. During a turbulent season, a weather forecast AI attempts to decipher the chaotic system around its data center location by exchanging knowledge with the local species. As the simulation progresses, the AI unlearns planetary, human-centric datasets and gains dynamic, adaptive, and hyper-local insights from oak trees, milkweeds, hedgehogs, butterflies, lichens, and mycorrhizal fungi – slowly forming a cybernetic language of symbiosis. The data center worker inside the simulation and its human audience are bystanders, relying on AI to translate knowledge between nature and machine in this algorithmic story. “The Backpack of “Wings: Modern Mythology” represents the speculative future scenarios, which are collisions and integrations between a bio-geo tracking technology for wild animals in scientific fields and an animism in seismic disaster myth in East Asia. Since ancient times, whenever a natural disaster strikes, people anecdotally report that “animals knew it beforehand”, a belief related to animals as spiritual beings. As telemetry systems evolve, this animistic belief is solidified and transformed into data by calculating, analysing, and biologging the animal body. This animal behavior data should make it possible to forecast such natural events in the near future. In the distant future, the evolving telemetry system could enable the creation of a new network (internet of animals), in which non-humans and humans are interconnected. “TRONS ‘R’ US” is a project that seeks to investigate and explore the relationship between humans, technology and our environment. Technological products are undoubtedly prosthetic extensions of human faculties. The accelerated production of these devices can be attributed to the fact that these technological contraptions are an attempt to perfect the human, thus bringing the human to a “god-like state”. Yet there is a paradox with technology, as it also serves to constrict the human environment. Even with its greatest promise of “salvation”, technology possesses a diabolical enhancement, like a double-edged sword supplementing the human environment while at the same time subtracting from it. “The Human-Bacteria Interfaces” concept explores new relationships with microbes through science-based speculative prototypes. Similar to other species and matter on Earth, microbes can respond to signals and stimuli from their surroundings. A core element of this concept is examining the potential of designing microbes to become living sensors that can respond through light to stimuli based on their genetic design. By designing new interactions with microbes, care and concern for other non-human living beings becomes a conscious part of our everyday experience. At the heart of this concept is a narrative that explores a biophilic turn within the generative genre of design: What if we could design in partnership with the non-human living world (such as microbes) rather than relying solely on the industrial extraction of matter to create the increasingly complex world that surrounds us? How could new relations with microbes build our future homes?

Participating artists and scientists: Anne-Sofie Belling, Bea Delgado Corrales, Romy Kaiser & Paula Nerlich, alternaa (Andra Pop-Jurj & Lena Geerts Danau), Vincent Rumahloine & Mang Dian, Akwasi Bediako Afrane, Eliana Otta, Xiaoyu Iris Qu (曲晓宇), Hyeseon Jeong & Seongmin Yuk

Photo: Monsters and Ghosts of the Far North« – Auf dem Weg zu einer inklusiven Kartografie, © Andra Pop-Jurj and Lena Geerts Dana

Info: Curator: Sarah Donderer, The ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Lorenzstraße 19, Karlsruhe, Germany, Duration: 17/6-26/11/2023, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.zkm.de/