Disparate Kingdoms Tangled in the Abyss: Biodiversity, Artificial Intelligence and Audio-Visual Performance

The creation of an audio-visual performance responding to a brief relating to biodiversity provoked a range of questions and issues: some at the moment of the work’s initial proposal, some in the development process and yet others retrospectively following the project’s completion. An assemblage of issues, objects and technologies are introduced and framed from a variety of different perspectives (object-orientated-ontology, entanglement theory, political ecology) before a discussion of the creative work itself articulates the intentions that guided the aesthetic and technical choices.

A generative metaphor of “making kin” (Haraway, 2016) guided much of practice which embraces human and non-human participants. In regards to the former, the variable subject positions of creative technologist rubbed against various national affiliations1. Regarding the latter, various technologies (e.g. object-orientated code, DSP, A.I., interface design, OSC) were intentionally troubled by a confrontation with digitally rendered, (un)life-forms derived from the deconstruction of the visual taxonomies associated with Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), Romantic, zoologist, biologist, artist and “scientific racist”.

The aims of the work were to unpack taxonomic bias in contemporary A.I. by using it to rework Haeckel’s, often exquisite, images of natural forms, to thereby problematicise inherited notions of biodiversity, hierarchical groupings of various kinds and the aestheticisation of nature in a post-(neo?) colonial context, and crucially, to create a meaningful audio-visual composition that responded successfully to the brief and could be shared with a diverse Mexican audience.