The ensuing history of human civilization, with its great inventions and rich cultural heritage, can be considered as the consequence of mankinds need to reach independence from nature and its hopeful endeavor of creating a better world.

Today, we have reached the point where the entire existence of our civilization and species depends on the maintenence of technological Infrastructure, so that we can state, that we have entered a new phase of dependency. At the same time, this technology has become the new environment. Now we are faced with an entirely new kind of Nature, in which biology and technology are intertwined and where human and nonhuman actors struggle for supremacy. This Nature 2.0 isn’t just an update, it is evidently a fundamentally new situation, that once again challenges our existing civilization to undertake enormous adaptation processes. 

Beyond of the macro-economic revolutions such as those we call gobalization, we as individuals also are undergoing profound changes, that are reminiscent of our former situation when we had to protect ourselves from a “hostile” environment. Which tools are available to us now?

The exhibition “A Beautiful Accident” confronts us with the pressing topics we see ourselves confronted with while heading towards a nearby era where Artificial Intelligence and autonomous machines ruled by algorithms will become part of our lifes and our bodies.

It took 3 billion years to evolve from unicellular simplicity to complex multicellular creatures in which cells specialized themselves over time and evolved to cells that took care for the communication between cells, sharing resources, digestion, or moving around. Humans were one of the spin offs of this evolutionary process that we can interpret, from a materialistic point of view, as being messy and full of unexpected and dramatic moments. It is hard to understand the basic laws that rule physical and non-physical systems in evolution, but we know that chaotic systems are a big part of them.

Chaotic systems tend to achieve maximum order before falling back into disorder and then start all over again to achieve order. They are unpredictable and never get into the same stage twice. Chaotic systems are present in most physical systems such as the universe. Different Ways to Infinity – DWI by Félix Luque Sánchez (BE), brings into experience – visible and audible – the metaphysical aspects of science. It shows us that dynamic and chaotic systems are constantly balancing between order and chaos, and that instability and unpredictability are as much part of much of our daily realities as of evolutionary processes.

We humans are a rare and exceptional outcome of the ongoing process of Evolution, we are equipped with very specific qualities, such as intellect and a free will. These qualities have made it possible for us to take evolution into our own hands. Developing technology was and is of major importance to get to this stage. Today we should question ourselves if our technology is suited for dealing with the ontological qualities of Life. So we should ask ourselves if we have enough understanding about the messy interactions that shape Life and matter, that generates an endless biodiversity, and that was needed to keep on evolving and developing to the world we are today: a planet with intelligent species equipped with consciousness.

Axon by Joris Strijbos is reflecting neural networks as sequences of electrical impulses that according Jeff Hawkins, could eventually lead to the creation of autonomous and creative machines. It is an audio visible work with 3 robotic sculptures that communicate with each other and their environment. Out of these interactions the systems generates choreography of movements, sounds and light. The work plays with the notion that all our memories are stored as sequences of electrical impulses that shoot through our brain.

“The central nervous system is nature’s Sistine Chapel, but we have to bear in mind that the world our senses present to us – this office, my lab, our awareness of time – is a ramshackle construct which our brains have devised to let us get on with the job of maintaining ourselves and reproducing our species. What we see is a highly conventionalized picture, a simple tourist guide to a very strange city. We need to dismantle this ramshackle construct in order to grasp what’s really going on.” J.G. Ballard, in The Kindness of Women, 1992

We donnot understand why and how intelligence, or consciousness emerged and how and why unicellular simplicity developed to complex multicellular creatures as for example human beings. These are the basic questions we are researching and reflecting ever since we developed language and probably even far before that.
One big question is: can the whole of evolution be seen as an exponential growth of intelligence? Or should we look at evolution as a process full of small and bigger ‘accidents’ that strongly contributed to the rise of human beings, which in this case could be seen as a Beautiful Accident?

These questions are back on the table again, this time even more pressing as before since we have set into motion the quest for artificial intelligence, and beyond that an intelligent technology. We can assume that successful intelligent technology will not depend on us humans anymore to further develop itself, it might start developing itself in a much more radical and faster way then we know from regular evolutionary processes, once it has reached the moment of becoming intelligent. It is not illogical to imagine that this technology will, like us humans, take its future in its own hands.

Reflecting possible intelligent technology poses the question how this technology will look at us humans, how would it understand our actions, interest and validate us within their own existence? The Council by Frederik De Wilde (BE) takes the sculpture Le Penseur by Rodin as the starting point of asking what the Thinker would be thinking about today. To answer this question De Wilde developed an AI and constructed a system that functions like a kind of hyper connected neural network, as we know it from our brains. The neurons are represented by a series of Raspberry (very small computers) that surf the Web, Darknet and/or archives, big data environments, to learn about specific urgent topics that characterize humanity, or better said us, and you the audience that visits the exhibition.

Developing intelligent technology might lead to what some people refer to as (technological) Singularity, the moment where technology develops itself independent from mankind. Some refer to this development as the end of the human era when looking at it from a more dramatic point of view. And to make it even more dramatic: some experts believe that Singularity might have happened already; we just haven’t noticed it yet. Other experts say that we don’t need to be afraid for this scenario since human intelligence can never be replaced by technology simply because we are not ourselves “thinking machines” in the sense in which that term is commonly understood. Our understanding of how intelligence and consciousness comes about is still so limited that we have not found the right models for artificially creating an intelligence that goes beyond an understanding of the brain being some kind of hard drive or information processing device. But on the other hand we might not need to understand what intelligence is since it might emerge spontaneously out of the technology we already have, and keep on developing.

Independent from the question if Singularity might occur spontaneously, we do know that technology can only become intelligent if it can learn, if it is able to create meaning, interpret and understands what it observes. Recursion by Sascha Pohflepp (DE) is a video work in which the artist developed an AI that had ‘to read’ texts about human biology, societal forms, some works on psychology, economics, emotion, science, technology, the human body and such. After this the AI was instructed to compose a text beginning with the word Human. The performer in the video is reading the text composed by the AI. In this way a loop is created in which both the AI and performer shape each other’s mind, and each other’s understanding by reading each other’s content.

One of the questions addressed earlier in this text is what kind of technology is able to become intelligent or beyond? And what kind of technology can deal with the unforeseen, that what is not predictable, the messiness or that what might be called ‘the accident’ within a system, or technology. The accident not solely understood as a destructive event, but also as being productive, revealing insights.

The works Activations, Autonomous Trap 001 and Gradient Ascent by James Bridle (UK) is an activist approach that shows us the limits of technology and its predictable aspects. The works takes a critical stand towards autonomous technology and shows us with humor possible ways to disrupt it. “It takes as central subject the self-driving car, it tests of human knowing and machine perception, strategizes modes of resistance to algorithmic regimes, and device new myths and poetic possibilities for an age of computation – J. Bridle”

The exhibition is presenting speculative and critical scenarios, narratives, research and observations that reflect today’s technological condition. In The Kitten AI by Pinar Yoldas presents us a future were an AI (artificial intelligence) in the form of a sweet kitten has taken over government since our old European politics is to slow to deal with the pressing issues of today like environmental decline, economic uncertainties, social instability, and the unstable political situation worldwide generating endless flows of refugees a.s. The Kitten A.I. sounds like a Silicon Valley CEO’s wet dream where technology has taken over politics, a dream that has been expressed by some large companies in Silicon Valley. They assume that technology is neutral and objective, and thus honest and truthful.

With Designer Babies, Pinar Yoldas further confronts us with the possibility that technology offers us today to enhance our genetic make up, in order to eradicate a particular defect, or to ensure that a particular gene is present. The project shows us that technology changes our view on Life, and vice versa how culture effects our view on technology and the options it offers us to create new (hybrid) Life forms in the Laboratory and redirect evolution within the context of a capitalistic and uncontrolled use of technologies lacking the necessary ethics.

The Modular Body by Floris Kaayk (NL) takes this scenario even one step further and shows us the complex process of the creation of Oscar, an artificial life form that is built like a modular system where one can replace parts of the body when it breaks down. The project is a kind of documentary that involves us in all aspects of creating such life forms, ranging from ethics to our still limited understanding of the self. Will Oscar be a purely biological enhanced or reduced life form? Will he be super intelligent? We should ask ourselves how artists and designers could and maybe should be involved in these developments, not just because creativity is needed, but above all imagination, and design methods that include ethics for example. 

Imagining future artistic scenarios and topics is undertaken in the project Predictive Art Bot by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska (FR) which is a playful critique on the promises of the use of algorithms to prevent potential crimes, and to make our life better and easier. For this project, they developed algorithms that suggest us artistic strategies for the future by monitoring the current debate on art, science and technology happening on the Internet (magazines, Blogs, etc.).  The project partly runs on Twitter (#predartbot) and has a feedback to the exhibition space where the sometimes astonishing future scenarios, that are generated and compiled out of magazines, online blogs and fora, are presented in a sensorial stimulating set up.

The 5th Trondheim biennale, Metamorf 2018 – A Beautiful Accident – Is aiming at a broad audience as well towards artists, designers, creators and thinkers. Together Meta.Morf wants to research, imagine and speculate on how we are looking at the future of mankind in the context of an overwhelming technological culture that hands us the tools for changing our future. 

Angelica D. Schmitt / Alex Adriaansens