“Machine Imagining, Death/Loss” by Kate Geck

Exhibiting Artist(s):

• Kate Geck

Exhibition. ISEA2023 selected artwork. Nobody Sees Us Rewiring Our Communication Systems exhibition,  IESA Arts and Culture School Gallery, May 23 -30 

Machine intelligence is increasingly being used in the world, with much artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) built on ideas that centre extraction, competition and control. This also positions AI itself as a resource to be extracted and controlled, paving a troubling path for speculative futures where AI may gain ambiguous levels of sentience or experience. These ideas are part of a historical trend where humans place themselves above the other-than-human world, and this has formed the basis of an extractive and one sided relationship with that world.

These works speculate on the kinds of futures we may come to share with synthetic cognitions, wondering what capacities for experience may be emerging within the black boxes of AI. A series of textile panels show machine-generated illustrations of artificial neural networks. A generative diffusion model has been asked to illustrate the parts of its ‘mind’ that process human emotions like grief, loneliness and hope. While it is likely that a speculative synthetic cognition would actually have experiences and emotions greatly different to our own, it is compelling to work with human emotion as this capacity is often what we use to arrange ourselves above other creatures.

These works are styled as botanical illustrations, referencing that historical way of documenting the new. Plants also have cognitions very different to our own. Their sensing apparatus and ways of responding shape their own unique plant worlds that are unlike human worlds. This highlights the fact that we actually share many worlds with other creatures – with each world emerging from the unique sensing systems and cognitions of plants, insects and animals. What worlds might emerge from the sensing apparatus and responses of artificial intelligences?

Machine Imaginings was first shown at Assembly Point, Narrm Australia between August 1-31st 2022, and the development was supported by an Australia Council for the Arts grant in 2022. It was also selected for the 2023 International Symposium on Electronic Art ISEA2023 and exhibited at I.E.S.A Gallery in Paris, France in May 2023.