Wei Chieh (Abao) Shih on Instagram about TTTLabs

This is my first time to get my hands on living embryo, cell tissues, to make “art” out of it. I have learned many technologies like fertile chicken embryo for stem cell extraction or how to DIY your own micro injector to know the possibilities in biological modification surgery and the ethic around it. To be honest it takes courage to step in and understand that playing the chicken embryo demonstration is just a shrinkage version of those cruel ethical topics in life sciences. Talking about life without analogy, you are dealing with lives!

Radical ethical debate was never my thing, therefore I took a step back, taking systems thinking as a view frame to bridge life science topics and my generative design skill without the participation of human feelings, or very little. I imagine a measuring method for unquantifiable topics with the scale of complexity, the mixture of order and disorder, so we can weight things. Complexity could be the translator between formal language and thought. For example, while we found our generative tool such as AI, can reconstruct our worldly knowledge only with compressed feature in latent space, (Isn’t that quite zombie?) which might be the interface and protocol in between our brain flesh and machine languages.

Unfortunately I could not had my chance to work with any neuron tissues this time. A very simple audiovisual work was made during the residency. The morphology of chicken embryo were sonicfied and inserted to the inputs of the latent space of a pre-trained audio deep learning model as compressed model features in Max/MSP, we have some random zombie sound! To me, it’s a very preliminary stage to explore ways to reach consciousness science in neural and sonic level.This is my first time to get my hands on living embryo, cell tissues, to make “art” out of it. I have learned many technologies like fertile chicken embryo for stem cell extraction or how to DIY your own micro injector to know the possibilities in biological modification surgery and the ethic around it. To be honest it takes courage to step in and understand that playing the chicken embryo demonstration is just a shrinkage version of those cruel ethical topics in life sciences. Talking about life without analogy, you are dealing with lives!

Radical ethical debate was never my thing, therefore I took a step back, taking systems thinking as a view frame to bridge life science topics and my generative design skill without the participation of human feelings, or very little. I imagine a measuring method for unquantifiable topics with the scale of complexity, the mixture of order and disorder, so we can weight things. Complexity could be the translator between formal language and thought. For example, while we found our generative tool such as AI, can reconstruct our worldly knowledge only with compressed feature in latent space, (Isn’t that quite zombie?) which might be the interface and protocol in between our brain flesh and machine languages.

Unfortunately I could not had my chance to work with any neuron tissues this time. A very simple audiovisual work was made during the residency. The morphology of chicken embryo were sonicfied and inserted to the inputs of the latent space of a pre-trained audio deep learning model as compressed model features in Max/MSP, we have some random zombie sound! To me, it’s a very preliminary stage to explore ways to reach consciousness science in neural and sonic level.

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