Year: 2022
Medium: multimedia installation
42 is an installation that explores non-human agency through multispecies storytelling, challenging traditional notions of intelligence. Bringing a fish, a machine and humans in an entanglement, it generates narratives via GPT-3, embracing improvisation, negotiation and Haraway's 'staying with the trouble'.
The project creates an improvisation system where the movement of the fish is writing different stories. The position of the fish decides the keywords pumped into GPT-3, which change with the fish and cannot be controlled by the audience. The coordinates on the screen help the audience realise that the fish’s position is controlling the piece, even though they don’t get the exact mechanism behind it.
42 provokes questions about human’s obsession with control and how to live in a more-than-human world. Leaning on Haraway’s ideas, the work takes the approach of ‘making-with’ rather than ‘self-making’, which means whenever a design decision is being made, instead of solely considering what the human wants to achieve, the needs and desires of different agencies involved are negotiated. Central to the project is the notion of entanglement, inspired by Barad's concept of 'agential cut'. It acknowledges the complex interplay of agencies and factors, advocating for responsibility and responsiveness to the liveliness of the world.
Improvisation serves as a critical tool, facilitating ethical engagement with unpredictability and change. Utilizing GPT-3 for narrative generation, the project embraces storytelling as a method to convey subjectivity and imagination, challenging hierarchical narratives. A key aspect of the project is its open-ended nature, avoiding rigid themes to allow for dynamic interactions and responses. Through improvisation, the project constructs narratives that continuously evolve, inviting audience engagement and reflection on the relationships between human and non-human agencies.