Environmental Intelligence

Miha Turšič, Waag

Artificial intelligence is a mainstream term describing the scientific study of intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence of humans and other animals. Upon closer inspection we find that the sentiment surrounding popular AI discourses solidifies human exceptionalism – it is human intelligence that proves its primacy by demonstrating the capacity to create an aritficial version of itself.

This perspective however ignores numerous overlooked actors that contribute to the functioning of computational machines; in fact, we posit that the intelligence of machines is an environmental matter. The environment so substantially influences intelligence demonstrated by machines that we should understand it as an environmental condition in itself. Such a shift from artificiality toward environmentality allows us to address the blind spots of technological neutrality, which downplays technology's historical, social, and environmental embededness. 

One of the main references of Waag's public research approach is Donna Harraway's notion that technology is not neutral[1]. In reference to her work, Chris Julien[2] argues that bias in AI is not a flaw in systems of measurement and automation, a 'remainder' to be exorcised, but a primary means of understanding, or rather accounting for our place and histories in the world, starting with our place in these artificially intelligent technological systems we talk so much about. Following bias, the dividing lines between domains such as technology and society, between nature and culture begin to diffract and collapse into each other, leaving us collectively stranded in the situation we once sought to discover, segment and control. Furthermore, the shiſt of perspective - from perfect windows allowing us to look 'onto' the world, to being 'in' the world together with these machines - directs our attention to the seams of AI implementation and calls for capacities to interpret the AI container. 

While social, business, legal and ethical perspectives of AI dominate mainstream narratives, Waag applies an ontologically flat material view to focus on overlooked agencies embodied within the container of intelligence demonstrated by machines. In the Anatomy of an AI System,[3] Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler dissected Amazon's Alexa smart home device, mapping the controversial practices of rare metal extraction and invisible human labour, which are essential for the processing of digital tasks. The extraction of material resources was also addressed within the Supre:organism exhibition Waag organized with Vijfhuizen Kunsfort in 2019[4]. The Kongo Astronaut video work by Eléonore Hellio and Michel Ekeba concerned life on a planet made foreign by environmental and societal devastation following cobalt mining. Withing the same exhibition, the Space Offshore project by RYBN.org approached resource appropriation by showcasing extensive documentation on controversial outer space mining legislation in Luxembourg and the USA, which disregards international Space treaties. While technology providers usually remain disinterested to such concerns, artworks like these give the public an opportunity to reflect on the uncomfortable side of the status quo. 

With environmental intelligence, the effort goes toward identifying the ways with which technology depends on and conists of environmental agencies. Planet Earth holds fascinating capacities expressed through chemical, biological, ecological and other processes. Science and technology that lead the effort of understanding the environment still recognize it merely as an object of observation or a resource, thus as something external. What artists observe is that through the processes of extraction and appropriation, the environment comes to live inside of us—humans and machines.

In Antti Tenetz's poetic and speculative work, Perihelion/Rage/secret_lover bacteria prosper solely on an analogue of lunar soil while deep dreaming, through neural networks, about what their life would look like on the Moon. We observe an organism that embodies the lunar environment and uses AI to daydream and speculate. Similarly, in PL'AI Špela Petrič developed a playground for the robot and plants to play. The artwork's neural network creates an abstract image of the plants as a mathematical matrix, just precise enough to identify the plants' movements so that the robot can reach closer to the tendrils that eventually hook up to the robot's interface. We observe neural networks imagining versions of an environment as relevant to the particular relationships in both cases. In this way, we again identify bias as a primary means of understanding both their and our place in the world.

Turning the gaze away from individual relations toward humanized environments, we not only observe the existence of bias but also its multiplicity. Aesthetics of exclusion with their project StreetSwipe[5]addresses the biased perception of an urban environment, specifically the aesthetics of gentrification. The artwork lets the audience determine if they think a photo of a bar storefront should be classified as 'gentrified'. Exploring digital environments, Tomo Kihara works with YouTube's recommendation algorithms in the TheirTube[6] project. The artwork demonstrates a trap of biased information bubbles where YouTube recommends users' popular content. In both cases, we observe a loop of influence, the way people as users form the physical and digital environment, while this biased environment locks its users into closed profiled containers. 

As a way to shift the perspective away from human exceptionality in the context of intelligence demonstrated by machines, Waag advocates for the response-ability toward the material agencies expressed through emerging technologies like AI, for the diversity and inclusivity of interpretations in machine perception, and for transparent and participatory categorization of digital environments. With such an agenda, Waag challenges the environmental divide between technological and ecological environments. Poor environmental literacy usually passes from makers to their machines. With a focus on the expression of environmental agencies, the use of intelligence demonstrated by machines turns from very human interests to environmental care. In this way living systems larger than individual entities such as rivers, forests, oceans and clouds, can become recognised as active makers and users of intelligent machines.

[1] "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women : The Reinvention of Nature (1991), pp.149-181.

[2] Chris Julien et al, Biased-by-default, position paper of AI Culture Lab, Waag

[3] Kate Crawford, Vladan Joler, Anatomy of an AI System: the Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources, Novi Sad: Share foundation, 2018, ISBN 978-86-89487-13-8

[4] https://waag.org/en/event/supreorganism-exhibition

[5] http://streetswipe.aestheticsofexclusion.com

[6] https://www.their.tube

Becoming an Oikos

Miha Turšič

Outer space is an extreme living environment, but it appears especially so from an anthropocentric perspective that seeks to establish human materiality outside its natural habitable zone. At the moment, the capacity of terrestrial life that is most represented in outer space is space technology. Techné (technology in the widest sense) historically emerged as an extension of the human body with which oeconomus (in ancient Greek meaning the manager, housekeeper) managed the oikos (ancient Greek meaning the family, the family's property, and the house). With oeconomus reaching into outer space, Earth’s oikos extends beyond terrestrial living materiality. Satellites, probes and rovers are not merely human prostheses; they are also extensions of terrestrial life. They are not just human-made, they are the product of ‘more than human’ efforts.

Space exploration has shown that the Cartesian human — one who uses reason to explore natural sciences — in association with the philosophical knowledge of principles known as techné, lacks the capacity to enliven sterile environments outside of Earth. Ecological thought understands that only oikos, the interconnection between numerous living agencies and the environment, can meet the challenges of pioneering extreme habitable worlds. Thus, an exploration of hybrid ecological, technoscientific and anthropological knowledge applied to extraterrestrial environments is necessary to assist functional but earthbound categories of knowledge in their becoming out-of-the-cradle systems of thought.

Although natural sciences and humanities have been considered separate domains for over four centuries, we are beginning to realise it is not possible to understand the human condition as separate from the living environment that shaped it. This insight is clearest when studying the human condition in the sterile surroundings of outer space, which comes as a novel challenge for humanities. Thus one of the big frontiers in humanities studies is not just the question of relations between humans, technologies and the environment, but the very knowledge within which observations, perceptions and appearances take shape.

Contemporary economic models, in general, take resources as a given and have a blind spot for material processes that established and continuously replenish the capacities used by humans in the production process. As humans are not isolated entities, but share existence and body with non-human organisms [1], taking credit for all production in a closed (biological) system such as the Earth is an ideologically biased perception. However, it is true that the ecology of life [2] has evolved from simple forms into more complex cultural forms that start to compete with natural forms.

Human reach into outer space is thus not just human; it’s also non-human. For example, “less than human non-human” [1] microbiomes are confronted with outer space conditions in intimacy with the astronauts’ bodies dwelling on the space station. Another example is the “extended non-human”, where techné is the mode with which we observe and sense outer space materiality. However, if we aim to reach outer space embodiment [3], an emancipated and self-sustainable life system has to be established. Life does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad of things that form, persist and break up in its currents [4].

Life is not a self-contained form; it is formed together with the living environment, or more precisely, the living environment is produced by living entities through their life [2]. Existing techné has proven to lack Spinoza’s capacity to act [5] or Morton’s essence [1] with which it could form a sustainable living environment. To achieve that, a more complex system is required, one like Earth’s ecosystem or experimental closed biological systems. We can understand extreme environments as other-than-human living environments, where humanness can be extended with its non-human extensions and counterparts.

If we seek to establish a living environment outside the Earth, we should consider doing that not with techné but with oikos. And that is another paradigm, where the contemporary dominant technoscientific knowledge would have to evolve towards an ecological framework, as British philosopher Timothy Morton describes: the ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it also thinks ecologically. Thinking the ecological thought is part of an ecological project [1]. German philosopher Erich Hörl goes even further with environmentality as a new contemporary condition, discussing how we must take into account our environmental becoming, not only of technology, but also of power, thinking, and the world itself [6].

We can conclude, that if we aim to establish a sustainable human presence in outer space, emancipated from the Earth, then the oeconomus has to become one with the oikos.

References
[1] Morton T.: Humankind, Solidarity with Non-Human People, Verso Books, 2017.
[2] Ingold T.: The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, Routledge; Reissue edition 2011.
[3] Braidotti R.: The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
[4] Ingold T.: Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, Routledge, 2011.
[5] Spinoza B.: Ethics, 1677.
[6] Hörl E., Burton J.(eds.): General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

This abstract was presented at ESA ESLAB conference 2017.

Becoming.a(Thing): An Artists’ Perspective on High Performance Computing

Špela Petrič and Miha Turšič

The article summarizes the process and outcome of the Future Emerging Art and Technology residency during which new media artists Špela Petrič and Miha Turšič undertook the challenge of understanding and manifesting the artistic potential of high-performance computing (HPC). As a result of the collaboration with FET-HPC the artists developed a concept liberated from the complex computational technicity to underscore the (un)intentional construction of meaning by algorithmic agencies. The performance presents a congress of actors sensing, interrogating and interrupting each other, thereby producing an excess of relation, interpretation and translation. The heterogeneous congress performs an expulsion of imposed (anthropogenic) meaning, substituted by authentic, autogenic sense and non-sense.

Posted Online June 20, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON_a_01469

© ISAST

This paper was the result of FEAT residency.

Beyond Life Cycles

Maja Murnik, Špela Petrič and Miha Turšič

Abstract

Human activities in outer space are producing increasing quantities of space “debris”. This well-known fact posits the question about the value and use of space technologies after their operation period has expired. Rather than calling these non-functional objects “debris”, we propose to treat them as “end-of-life allopoietic systems” with the potential of becoming autopoietic systems. In general, our utilitarian, anthropocentric, and control-oriented management of processes discourages research into emancipated, unfamiliar entities which do not (yet) appear in our ecosystems. However, outer space technology with its literal and symbolic remoteness presents an opportunity to transform utilitarian objects at their end-of-life into emancipated non-utilitarian living or life-like systems without the danger of interaction with the existing living systems of our planet. Here we outline a composite approach to the challenge.

Composite Methodologies for Outer Space

From the beginnings of Modern age, artistic and scientific communities have been epistemologically strictly divided, each following their own methods and protocols, but concerning themselves with similar issues and topics. Recently, however, composite protocols stemming from the intersection between art and science have been emerging. These composite protocols are relevant to both spheres, but deal with issues unsolvable using methodologies of either sphere separately. It is crucial to search for new knowledge that has references in basic, natural, and applied sciences as well as in art and humanities. To achieve this, we must overcome the persistent modes and patterns of the dualist thinking inherited from Cartesianism as well as abandon the traditional conception that art deals primarily with the aesthetic and beautiful, and that it produces nice, contemplative forms that are made to please our eyes and soul. Such views on art derive from a certain age, i.e. from the 18th and the 19th century when such conception of art flourished, and when the divide between art and science has reached its peak as well. Today, it is time to embark towards a new paradigm of knowledge.

The constructivistic approach we would like to employ here is based on inter-subjectivity instead of the classical objectivity, and on viability instead of reaching one objective truth. It implies that the combination of both scientific fact and artistic/cultural manifestation leads to an abstraction, which can be projected into our cognitive reality. This abstraction of art and science in action is called the composite projection. The composite projection works as an iteration of the process of extrapolating what we know of reality to what we think reality should be, then reconsidering the initial projection with new facts and developments, leading to a modified projection etc. The result therefore has multiple sequential manifestations within the realm of the possible, probable, speculative and fictional. Composite protocols thus stem from both artistic and scientific methodologies, but they are not necessarily consistent with one or the other. They facilitate a holistic understanding of particular topics that are the subject of both science and art practices. The knowledge is generated within the actual/real and conceptual/belief.

In the context of the empirically positivistic conception of science, which operates with the empirically proven, deductive truths, the application of these is guided by necessity, utility and efficiency. The result of such knowledge is therefore an applied solution within the bounds of the possible and measurable. The context of science prohibits the suspension of the possible to construct the impossible, i.e. to produce speculative narratives, fiction and fantasy (as Francis Bacon condemned the philosophy of the speculative as a harmful detour away from the truth). In this sense, speculation (when not understood as extrapolation) and fiction can be conceived as a conscious denial of fact and the reasonable, a state of belief in an idea not embedded in reality, or as a product of the anti-rational. Even so, the futuristic narratives should rely on a consensus of the possible.

Contemporary philosopher Eugene Thacker observes that there have only ever been three approaches to thinking about life: SOUL, MEAT, and PATTERN (Thacker, 2005). Within this trinity everything is deemed to be animate, living, and vital. In the time of networks, swarms, and multitudes of genetic and information technologies, the PATTERN pervades systems of all kinds and it seems to be dominant today. Despite this observation, can we rid ourselves of this trinity and dare to invent some other approach to thinking about life? The existence of our progenies beyond the edges of our heliosphere, in the absolute absence of the human and his/her effects, certainly seeks to broaden the scope of these concepts. What life is in this realm might not fit into Thacker’s trinity of soul, meat and pattern.

Post-terrestrial Life

From its very beginning, technology has proceeded with the promise of providing us with greater control. Modernity (Modern age) promised control over nature through science and material abundance through technology. At this point we can find the opportunity to think beyond the confines of control and surveillance, beyond the dualities of utilitarian and non-utilitarian, cause and effect, soul and meat, pattern and random, live and dead, etc. The feedback we can get from technological products that abandon the dualities of our terra- thinking, which in fact owes a lot to Cartesian conceptions, is entirely unpredictable.

The “end-of-life” space objects are terrestrial materializations of human thought having potential to become the emancipated, functional units, capable of cognition and, consequently, of identity. Terrestrial sensory probes at the edges of our solar system, the farthest-reaching manifestations of humanity, were designed to fulfill strictly scientific purposes. However, the ultimate fate of these objects, beyond relentlessly serving humanity with data, had not been determined at their launch. The remoteness and the ebbing life of these extensions of the human species are gradually turning the augmentations into independent objects.

Our challenge is to nurture the teleology of space probes beyond their initial purpose. We aim to explore possible modifications of existing and future space probes to turn allopoietic instruments into resilient, self-repairing, robust, autonomous, energy efficient, adaptable systems, all of which are properties current technology lacks, but living systems possess.

The Authentic Environment

To create artificial life on Earth is a proof-of-principle; proof that we understand living systems to the extent we are able to recreate them. This positivistic approach, however, does answer the question why one should attempt to do so, since life has been ubiquitous and resourceful through both space and time in terrestrial environments. Outer space is in fact the authentic environment of artificial life, because life (as far as we know) has not been able to colonize it on its own.

We begin to apply the current knowledge of resilient self- organizing systems to the construction of the next generation of space probes. Unlike scientists, who would equip the next probes with ever better and more complex systems designed to carry out scientific experiments, we foresee the addition of a simple entity, which can withstand the conditions in outer space, but also with the ability to adapt, if it encounters environmental changes; made up of a self-repairable matrix, coined from autonomous technology and simple living (or life-like) systems; working in a symbiosis to absorb entropy and fight decay.

Emancipated Space Technologies

Distance is a tool of scientific and artistic contemplation. Creating progeny that is foreign and non-utilitarian in every respect has great philosophical value as it presents us with a (bio)technological version of the “overview effect”. The alienation induced by this other has the potential to transform the familiar and recalibrate the human condition, urging us to revise the dominant but often exclusionary humanist values.

Humankind, in awe of scientific knowledge, humanistic understanding and artistic possibilities, can produce an unthinkable civilizational value. Enabling autonomous processes out of our reach is a civilizational step that can lead to a better understanding not only of what we know but also what we don’t.

This paper was part of the Voyager/140AU project, presented at ECAL 2013: The Twelfth European Conference on Artificial Life July 2013.