AI Murmurings

What if we could teach AIs to sing frequencies of repair and healing? This fascinating window into the world of artist Pia Lindman helps recalibrate understandings of what technology is and can be. She introduces a realm she calls the ‘subsensorial’ and describes the deeply embedded environmental awareness she has cultivated to navigate the entangled realities of a planet in crisis. Traversing subjects including humanoid robotics, Finnish mythology, and happy microbes (among others), listeners will gain insight into Lindman's practice of ‘healing as art,’ her years as a research fellow at MIT, and her upcoming presentation at the 2024 Venice Biennale. At a time when machine intelligences reach into nearly every facet of our lives, this artist illuminates a ‘Slower’ way forward—where machines not only collaborate with humans in more harmonious ways, but also become vital actors in the healing of our world.

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Learn more about Pia Lindman: https://www.pialindman.com/

Also mentioned during this episode

Kansanlääkintäseura Folk Medicine Society

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

CS1 Curatorial Projects

Heidi Fast

Aaron Edsinger

Domo

Vidha Saumya

Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo Heimonen

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image: Pia Lindman standing in her installation Nose, Ears, Eyes at the 32nd São Paulo Bienal | photo by Guilherme Prado

In her stunning artistic and filmmaking work, Saodat Ismailova paints a vivid, multidimensional tableau of the pasts, presents and possible futures of Central Asia. Her intricate visual and sonic layerings of histories, myths, and both inner and outer landscapes serve as sites of knowledge transmission and also as spaces for ‘radical re-remembering’ that, in the words of decolonial thinker Rolando Vasquez, “not [only] safeguard or preserve what is there, but also create alternative worlds.” Traversing a range of topics—including the fabric of dreams, the cyclical nature of time, and silence as a gesture of resistance—this conversation probes how Ismailova’s poetic interweavings of spaces, times and memory could lead to a richer palette of expressions for artificial intelligences.

Learn more: Saodat Ismailova / Davra Collective

The quote from Rolando Vasquez is from Field Essays, Q: Meandering in Worlds of Mourning (ed. Sophie Krier, Onomatopee, 2022)

This season of AI Murmurings is generously sponsored by The Resonance Foundation. Music by Christopher Tignor. Audio engineering by Fabian Reichle.

In the 1970's and '80's, the Swiss artist Heidi Bucher summoned a future that we only now are beginning to grasp. Her latex skinning actions and sculptures promised emancipation from patriarchy and the social body politic, and at the same time were fertile sites of ‘magical transfer’ to as-yet-unimagined worlds. Curator and art historian Chus Martínez helps us locate the ‘underground rivers’ of Heidi Bucher’s creative practice, the realms of techno-fantasy she inhabited far ahead of her time, and the keys she may have been leaving to decrypt some future reality—perhaps with the help of AI’s.

Martínez also shares about about her role as head of Institute Art Gender Nature at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, the importance of artists and artworks as 'monsters' to disrupt capitalist forces, and about love and generosity as drivers of freedom.

image: Photographic documentation of the skinning process of Gentlemen’s Study (Herrenzimmer), Winterthur-Wülflingen, 1978/ Photo by Hans-Peter Siffert, courtesy of The Estate of Heidi Bucher https://heidibucher.com/

This season of AI Murmurings is generously sponsored by The Resonance Foundation. Music byChristopher Tignor. Audio engineering by Fabian Reichle.

In this exciting conversation with Brazilian artist Camila Sposati, we map her dynamic practice of (slow-ly) digging into the ground and into the unknown to reveal and weave together layers of identity, bodies, artifacts – and also energy. Could the multiple meanings and interpretations that her practice unearths and the ‘thick visioning of caring’ it models be a roadmap for the near-future of our technologies? Together we imagine how giving agency to our machines—transforming them from objects to subjects, encouraging them to dance and spin—might allow us to discover expanded ways of being human.

Learn more about Camila Sposati here >>

This new season of AI Murmurings is generously sponsored by The Resonance Foundation. Music by Christopher Tignor. Audio engineering by Fabian Reichle.

How to imbue AIs with an enlivened sense of space? Architect and practice-based researcher Renske Maria van Dam challenges normative spatial paradigms with situated interventions that extend the sensorium and help our bodies access new realms of energy. The conversation here explores the ‘soft shifts’ afforded by Japanese approaches to space—including the enigmatic spatio-temporal interval ma—, the speculative architecture of Arakawa+Gins, and Renske’s own ‘unbalancing procedurals’ that draw us into dynamic reciprocity with the world around.'

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The image here of the Go’o Shrine on Naoshima Island (JP) iscourtesy of Renske Maria van Dam

What if our technologies were spilling over with joy and abundance and messiness and fierce feminisms? The generous ideas shared here by artist Sands Murray-Wassink are light on AI but go heavy on how we (and our technologies) might be enriched—queered— by a more open, horizontal and intersectional approach. While far-reaching, the conversation is anchored by Sands’ recent project collaboration Gift Science Archive, a ‘durational performance’ commissioned by the arts organization If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. Learn more at giftsciencearchive.net and sands1974.com

From the delicate unfolding of a tiny leaf to visions of blossoming skyscrapers, this inspired conversation with interdisciplinary artist Maria Blaisse and composer Kate Moore brings us all a step closer to a more harmonious future with AI. Through their respective languages of form and music, Maria and Kate share how their practices have afforded them glorious glimpses of a larger ‘intelligence’ that most cannot yet perceive. With or without our technologies, they explain, the way forward to (and through) such thresholds of energy and experience is a matter of deep attention, trust in processes of unfolding, and an embrace of the unknown.

What if we approached AI from an interdependent, intergenerational perspective? With their joint project The Court of Intergenerational Climate Crimes, Jonas Staal and Radha D’Souza propose new artistic and legal imaginaries that both interrogate and aim to dismantle the structures and mentalities that have brought humans and non-humans alike to the brink of extinction. How do those same forces permeate the technologies that have become so integral to our daily lives? Could a more conscious, ‘comradely’ approach to AI’s help repair the damage that has been done and move us closer to the worlds we want to create? This conversation is a sobering invitation to situate ourselves in the full complexity of our present moment.

From the poetics of matter to ‘machines of loving grace,’ this conversation with artist Oscar Santillán charts a course through subtly networked ecologies of knowledge—and the unknown—that he calls ‘Antimundo.’ He describes how his practice is animated by research into technologies both ancient and emerging, ponders noise as a strategy for AI, and explains how an indigenous coding device from the Andes might offer relational clues to the future.

Can embracing the world in billion year chunks help us navigate the future of AI? In an inspired conversation with Dakin Hart, Senior Curator at the Noguchi Museum in New York, this episode focuses on the life and work of Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Covering topics both earthbound and cosmic, we ponder the past, present, and possible future(s) of humanity through Noguchi’s lens of hybridity, ‘voidiness,’ and the in-between.