Interspecies Communication
Hybrid Session №1

We live in an age in which our perspective on nature is changing. In the past, nature was viewed in contrast with culture, home, and society. When we thought of nature, it was as something separate from us. This type of thinking led us to a state in which the human fingerprint is recognized in every layer of the natural, such that the very term has lost its meaning. Above all, the age of anthropocentrism symbolizes our conception of the human as the axis around which the world revolves.

In the past decade, however, an increasing number of researchers have discovered that the organisms living around us have sophisticated consciousness of their environment and of each other, and that they are able to transmit what they feel. To develop a true understanding of how ecological systems work, we will have to go beyond the borders of human understanding and communication. For example, plants and animals have different ways of interacting with the world. How do plants experience the concept of time in a different way? What is the role of oak trees in preserving the conditions of life in Israel? How does the octopus communicate through complex bodies? In this encounter, we will speak with artists who use artificial intelligence and scientific research to develop new ways of interspecies communication.

● The event will be simultaneously live streamed on the website. In addition, in a reality of closing and opening of skies, our program is due to changes. Join us on our Telegram channel and subscribe to our newsletter to get real-time updates.

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South African multimedia artist Maggie Roberts founded the Orphan Drift collective in 1994. The collective cooperates with Etic Lab in developing the ISCRI project – an AI model trained on octopuses. This project combines art, science, and technology, and experiments on interspecies communication between octopuses and AI, with human beings as mediators. Serpentine Gallery and UCL Creative AI laboratory are partners in this project.

Since its founding in London in 1994, Orphan Drift has been exploring human frontiers alongside the mechanisms of vision and imagination. In this project, the collective attempts to draw our attention to the similarity between the modes of operation of artificial intelligence and the somatic tendencies of the octopus – as a decentralized, multi-horizon consciousness.

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In many mystical traditions, a deep interaction developed between humans and space, which is based on experience more than on conscious thinking. This type of interaction is embodied in strengthening the connection between the human being and space. The development of scientific thinking followed by the digital revolution minimized the presence of mystical traditions in our modern world. In this lecture, I will reduce the gap between spiritual and shamanistic perceptions and conscious, educated thinking. I will do so by building a bridge between traditions, to render accessible a worldview that served most of humanity for most of its existence, and by presenting the content of spiritual interactions with computers and technology. In particular, we will examine relationships in ecological systems based on oak trees. We will learn how traditional shamanism relies on hidden relationships between natural entities. Further, we will examine the feasibility of embedding similar interactions in computerized spaces.

Professor Amit Raphael Zoran is a researcher at the School of Engineering and Computer Sciences of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a lecturer on design at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. He was awarded the Design Award by the Ministry of Culture. He has a Ph.D. and M.Sc. from the MIT Media Laboratory, holds an MA in design from Bezalel, and a BA in Communications Systems Engineering from Ben Gurion University. He researches the relationship between human beings and technology, including the cognitive, culture, creative, technological, and mystic aspects of this interaction, and he develops hybrid interactive systems that connect humans and the environment.

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“Latentscape” describes virtual landscapes and territories, accompanied by music created through machine learning trained on traditional music, folk music, and pop, without temporal or cultural limitations. This work is a study of borderless territories, in which pixel streams take the form of cracks, erosions, surface paths, and hills. The colors and textures of these elements represent memories, which these territories express through their form, which was Shaped over the years. The topographical maps were created through various machine learning processes (GAN), trained on complex data systems from satellite photos publicly available on the internet. These were combined and weighted with numerous types of data systems to produce errors in the training stage of the learning machines, with the aim of creating unexpected results.

Franz Rosati is a musician, digital artist, and lecturer. He uses digital technologies and individually adapted software as a basis for his artistic production, which attempts to embody a kind of expression that is different from audiovisual performances, screen-based presentations, Generative art, and other types of art. He examines a broad range of aesthetic output, from procedural and generative minimalism (rendered in real-time) and creation of virtual autonomous creatures to imminent, dystopian landscapes.

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In addition to lectures and performance, we invite you to explore site-specific installations by Orphan Drift, Entangled Studios, Niv Gafni, Love Studio, Jordan Colsey + Deborah Fischer + Ofer kantor, Erez Ezra + Avi Cohen + Boris Levin, Rachella Alcalay, Memo Akten, Matty Mariansky, Ben Drusinsky, Alon Tayar, Mark IJzerman + Sébastien Robert.

Video art and short film program: ❶ Unrendered Road, Tali Liberman ❷ Grandmother, Yoel Peled ❸ Third Nature, Daria Kiseleva ❹ Separation, Barak David Mizrahi ❺ Buzina Decardinuta, Nir Shitrit