It’s wonderful to be in a room with so many humans after all this time. In the last few years, I've been keeping company with a new species that happens to live in the air. And I'd like you all to meet my aerobe friend.
(Music)
(Music ends)
(Cheers and applause)
I get emotional every time I see it fly.
In my work as an artist, I ask a lot of questions about the world around me. While the problems of the world don't have easy solutions, I think it's as important to ask the right questions. Why do our technologies instill so much fear in us? Why do our lives today feel so alienating, when our technologies are supposed to improve our lives? And why do we feel so disconnected, when our inventions are meant to connect each and every one of us?
My artwork deals with evolution, biology and the senses. I'm interested in how organisms are composed of different life-forms, such as bacteria, fungi and viruses ... but also how different chemical and molecular interactions can happen whenever we simply take a breath.
So I've always found modern technology to be quite limiting because of how cold and flat it is. But what if our machines could be more holistic? And what if our machines could relate to us in a more holistic way? And what if our machines could be more than just our tools, and instead, a new type of companion species? I believe we need to embrace who we are as symbiotic living beings, and design machines to reflect this. What if the world was populated by machines that were more like animals and plants, instead of something you'd find in a factory? This exploration could teach us so much more about life, in all its vast complexities.
These ideas might sound like mere science fiction, but my mission as an artist is to create possibilities of other worlds, and other ways of living and being, even if just for a moment.
So when I was invited to imagine a large-scale installation at the Tate Modern in London, I decided to make this world I'm describing a reality. The museum space is incredibly vast, and I knew right away that I wanted to transform it into an aquarium of machines. I asked myself, "What would it feel like to live in the world with machines that could live in the wild and evolve on their own?" To explore this question, I created two new machine species that I call "aerobes." I released 12 aerobes into the museum space so they could form their own small ecosystem. In order to minimize our human-centric biases, and to steer clear of simply mimicking the human form, I worked with my team to look at the natural world, and we were inspired by creatures like the comb jellyfish and the lion's mane mushroom. We also looked deeply into the field of soft robotics, and ultimately brought the aerobes to life by designing them with fluid movement and lighter-than-air construction.
When you look at these aerobes, it gives you a feeling almost opposite to the uncanny valley. You know that they're mechanical, yet they feel palpably alive. You feel like you might be next to some majestic and remote life-form. Like swimming next to a humpback whale. Their size is imposing ... yet they inspire an emotion closer to awe than to fear. You sense that they're almost living, and it makes you want to embrace and coexist with them, to see them truly succeed.
I wanted the aerobes to have a sense of freedom and unpredictability, so I worked with my team to create what is called an artificial life simulation. This software allows each aerobe to develop unique behaviors and to respond autonomously to its environment. The aerobes evolve their personalities as they interact and learn from each other. The more we flew them, the more we got to know their distinct personalities and their gentle nature. It was very important for me that the aerobes had their own sensory world. Most AI functions like a mind without a body. But all living creatures, from the humble tick to the stealthy panther, learn about the world through their bodies and their senses. These aerobes perceive each other through high-frequency radio waves, and they use thermal sensing to detect other living creatures in their environment. An aerobe might be curious about your heat signature, and fly over to greet and flirt with you, while other aerobes are more shy and might go out of their way to avoid a crowd.
How will these machines and humans be together in the world? What will this world look like? This world may see machines and humans generating new intimacies and alternate perspectives. My hope is that these aerobes will help us appreciate a more diverse way of living and being. Their purpose is not to compete with us or to dominate us, but to ask what a more compatible future could look like.
We all have a stake in this conversation about technologies. Can we actively align machines to better reflect our biological reality? I sincerely hope that you'll consider that machines can be so much more than what we've known, and how they might embody a wisdom drawn from biology. This project is a project for everybody, to imagine different worlds and different futures.
It's not too late to change machine evolution and to consider new goals, where machines and humans can coexist in a more compassionate way. I believe this is where we can start the conversation.
(Applause)
(Music)
(Music ends)
Thank you.
(Cheers and applause)
