Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

The Probe Series is a robotic installation series driven by machine learning models that investigate how machine systems logic could live in physical space and manifest in machine-human social dynamics. Set in the conceptual framework of a post-planetary space exploration narrative, the series frames machine perception as “alien” and speculates on a future where conscious machines may bear the trials of space travel to examine “hostile” human-occupied environments in search of new habitats. On a broader level, this series of works explores the societal implications of machine life colonization, offering an alternative perspective on discussions around the Panspermia hypothesis. These machine beings operate as invasive lifeforms that are simultaneously observers of human behavior and activity, as well as artificial agents that inevitably form an interrelationship with the subjects of their investigation. The Probe Series follows this train of thought, where each installment delves into one aspect of sensory perception, taking inspiration from human sensory systems functions such as vision, auditory senses, and touch. In this process, human perceptive models are transformed into machine perceptive models, which in turn deconstruct and reconstruct human culture.

The cybernetic and perceptual framework for the Probe Series centers around the design of the human-machine observer and observed relationship. In the gallery space, the audience engages with the machines that look back on them and, through constant analysis and reinterpretation of data, generate a reappropriated sense of reality based on a synthetic sensory system. Our own technologies act as a reflection and imitation of what it means to be human, utilizing the gallery space as a perceptual sphere where different levels of signals, interference, noise, and error lead to misinterpretation by the machines, much like the story, The Blind Men and the Elephant. As Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley question in Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design, “Even a machine might ask itself if it is human and some machines may well be more human than people. The question are we human? Is from the beginning a hesitation about the relationship between ourselves and everything around or inside us.”

Probe I: Averso Specillo Di Ducendum utilizes computer vision to mimic the human visual system in the brain to detect objects and lifeforms and captures crowd data in the immediate space around it, including presence, attributes, and movement, and feeds it back to a machine learning model. This data is then categorized, reinterpreted, and displayed as a dynamic cylindrical heat map in an alien visual language.

Probe II: Subaudition investigates spoken word and speculates on how alien forms might interpret or misinterpret human language. The installation consists of a binary set of machines that apply machine learning methods of speech-to-text recognition in exploring the concept of “subaudition,” reading between the lines, through the translation, degradation, and misinterpretation of meaning in spoken language into binary information transmitted between the two machines. This information is expressed as each machine's kinetic movement and visual signaling outputs. Together, the two machines mimic the human ear and language processing system in the brain, where audio signals are picked up and translated into an internal language to the body, in this case, the synthetic machine system.

Probe III: Cutaneous Environer, a third forthcoming installment of the series, takes inspiration from the skin, the largest organ of the human body that acts as a barrier, providing protection and sensation between the internal and external environments. Probe III captures different environments and human habitats and simulates these environments for other “lifeforms” to experience. The installation projects 360 videos and captured environmental data into the exhibition space, controlling and monitoring the space in recreating the sensorial experience of a site-specific environment over a 24-hour day.

The Probe Series poses the question: can machine learning models act as complex archives and artifacts of human behavior? Can machines “learn” human culture? Are they reliable witnesses? Furthermore, do we lose a part of ourselves to our creations? Do we merge as one, each altering the other?