Media Library

FESTIVAL EXHIBITION: AI ANCESTORS – Making Kin in the Future

2022-06-22, 1:00 PM

Who are “we?” Where do community and kinship begin and end? For whom do humans feel interest, responsibility, love, and empathy? What if humans were to enter into an open dialogue – not only with one another, but also with other animals, with plants, with fungi, or inorganic life forms past and present?

Could “we” then talk, dream, and coexist beyond the boundaries of our species and our linear understanding of time? Who would “we” then become? And could artificial intelligences (AI) facilitate reciprocal learning – could they help us respect and even understand nonhuman intelligences better? The exhibition AI ANCESTORS explores these questions, researching alliances between species. The featured voices draw on decolonial, intersectional, trans- and ecofeminist approaches, non-Western and Indigenous ways of being and knowledge systems. Through body, poetry, and sound, they explore animist myths in Tibet and co-authorship with AI, responding to audience members’ heartbeats, whispering poems of the future. Instead of trivializing or glorifying AI, its utopias and dystopias, AI ANCESTORS invites visitors to be part of these futures today, to feel them for themselves.

 

WE 15.6. and THU 16.6. | 13.00–19.00 daily as well as

FR 17.6. – THU 23.6. | 13.00–22.00 daily | Ground Floor | Free Entry

With work by K Allado-McDowell USA | Rike Scheffler Germany | Himali Singh Soin India/UK & David Soin Tappeser Germany | Louise Walleneit Germany

Curation: Rike Scheffler

Co-Curation: Mathias Zeiske

Project leaders: Rike Scheffler, Birgit Voigt (Assistance)

Exhibition texts

The exhibition AI ANCESTORS – Making Kin in the Future is a project of eurobylon e.V. and is funded by the NEUSTART KULTUR program initiated by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) and kindly supported by the Embassy of the USA in Berlin and the British Council Berlin. bodycheck was supported by the Creative Fund of the Bauhaus University Weimar and a guest performance grant from the Kulturstiftung Sachsen.

The poesiefestival berlin is a project of the Haus für Poesie in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste, with support from the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.