Case Study: Remixing Knowledge with Layered Intelligences

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Lucy HG Solomon
Cesar Baio

Abstract

The case study of Degenerative Cultures explores how the layering of different forms of logic offers an opportunity for rethinking our human systems and hypothetically remixing the epistemological roots of society—through interventions into our technological systems. In Degenerative Cultures, the living organism Physarum polycephalum partners with an artificial intelligence that compiles and corrupts an archive of human texts. In the iterative art installation, which incorporates the growth cycles of microbiological organisms, protists as well as fungi cover up and effectively remix human texts. Human knowledge, contained within the philosophy books used in the project, becomes the substrate for organic growth. The living organisms grow over an actual book, and the AI, referred to as a “digital fungus,” corrupts texts on the Internet. The artists’ experiment, which links microbiological growth logic to artificial intelligence, is one step in rethinking how human knowledge may become layered and ultimately corrupted and rerouted—a forking of sorts—through integration with nonhuman logic systems, including microbiological and artificial intelligences. By orienting this work to remix theory, the article offers the hypothesis of a multispecies recombination that could, in utopian terms, reformulate the epistemological basis of modernity. In order to pursue this hypothesis, the art collective Cesar & Lois asks what role remix plays in the ongoing emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

Article Details

Section
Essays
Author Biographies

Lucy HG Solomon, Cesar & Lois (art collective); California State University San Marcos (Department of Art, Media and Design)

LUCY HG SOLOMON

Associate Professor of Art, Media and Design, California State University San Marcos

Lucy HG Solomon is associate professor of Art, Media and Design at California State University San Marcos, where she directs DaTA Lab (Digital and Transdisciplinary Arts); she is a 2021 Fulbright scholar.

CESAR & LOIS

Art collective consisting of Lucy HG Solomon and Cesar Baio

Cesar & Lois integrates natural and technological networks, probing humanity’s relationship to nature by advancing intersections between nonliving and living systems. Consisting of Lucy HG Solomon (CA, USA) and Cesar Baio (SP, Brazil), the collective creates bio-digital hybrids and studies the output of nonhuman systems. Cesar & Lois endeavors to think with nonhuman networks, pondering microbio-logic (based on growth algorithms of microorganisms) while studying how this can inform human logic. Through adventurous interdisciplinarity, the cross-continental collective questions societal structures that perpetuate global inequities. Merging laboratory and technological spaces, the duo performs microbiological mappings in order to learn from overlapping patterns of human-based knowledge and nature’s growth algorithms. Cesar & Lois exhibits in spaces across oceans, with exhibitions traveling from Ravenna to San Francisco, and actions from Berlin to Durban. Cesar & Lois received the Lumen Prize in Artificial Intelligence (2018) and were finalists in Singapore’s biennial Global Digital Art Prize (2019) and Poland’s International Competition for Intermedia Art (2019). The collective was selected as artists in residence at Coalesce Center for Biological Arts (2020) and UC Davis’s Hess Laboratory (2020).

cesarandlois.org

Cesar Baio, Cesar & Lois (art collective); UNICAMP (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)

CESAR BAIO, Associate Professor, Art and Technology, UNICAMP (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)

Cesar Baio is an associate professor of Art and Technology and director of ACTLab (Art, Science and Technology) at UNICAMP (Universidade Estadual de Campinas) and was a CAPES research fellow at i-DAT in the UK.

CESAR & LOIS

Cesar & Lois integrates natural and technological networks, probing humanity’s relationship to nature by advancing intersections between nonliving and living systems. Consisting of Lucy HG Solomon (CA, USA) and Cesar Baio (SP, Brazil), the collective creates bio-digital hybrids and studies the output of nonhuman systems. Cesar & Lois endeavors to think with nonhuman networks, pondering microbio-logic (based on growth algorithms of microorganisms) while studying how this can inform human logic. Through adventurous interdisciplinarity, the cross-continental collective questions societal structures that perpetuate global inequities. Merging laboratory and technological spaces, the duo performs microbiological mappings in order to learn from overlapping patterns of human-based knowledge and nature’s growth algorithms. Cesar & Lois exhibits in spaces across oceans, with exhibitions traveling from Ravenna to San Francisco, and actions from Berlin to Durban. Cesar & Lois received the Lumen Prize in Artificial Intelligence (2018) and were finalists in Singapore’s biennial Global Digital Art Prize (2019) and Poland’s International Competition for Intermedia Art (2019). The collective was selected as artists in residence at Coalesce Center for Biological Arts (2020) and UC Davis’s Hess Laboratory (2020).

cesarandlois.org