Degenerative Cultures: Corrupting the codes of duality
By Cesar & Lois (Cesar Baio and Lucy HG Solomon) | Professional (International category)
“We work cross-continentally, collaborating on an almost daily basis. The Internet makes our artmaking – one that draws on our very different experiences (in Brazil, in California) possible. At the same time, the Internet is both the conduit and the object of our work. The growing live microorganism tweets at @HelloFungus, while the AI fungus scours the Internet and consumes texts that indicate humanity’s presumed superiority over “Nature.” In doing so, we are interested in imagining unprecedented types of networks, with connections and cooperation between human and non-human, living and non-living nodes.”
~ Cesar & Lois
Degenerative Cultures: corrupting the codes of duality is an iterative installation in which living organisms, social networks and Artificial Intelligence (AI) work together to write over the intellectual malware of modernity. The installation in Singapore is part of a series, and in each iteration Cesar & Lois addresses a different part of the repository of texts that reflects the human desire to master “nature.” This results in twitter output from the collaborating systems’ digestion of scholarly writing on humanity’s relationship to the rest of the living world.
Degenerative Cultures integrates living and digital systems in a single network. Books that deal with humanity’s desire to control “nature” are the growth substrates for a colony of microorganisms. Beside this book inoculated with Physarum polycephalum is a computer monitor, where a digital fungus integrates AI with generative algorithms based on the growth of the living organisms. The intelligent digital fungus searches the Internet and corrupts online texts that relay an intent to control the living world. These two parts of this bhiobrid (bio-hybrid) system, one organic and the other informational, communicate through a digital interface. Anyone can interact with the artwork through twitter and help to destroy predatory texts. The resulting database corruption is directed by microorganisms, and readouts from the consumption of the physical book and the digital database are visible in the twitter feed of @HelloFungus.
Conceived and developed across continents, Degenerative Cultures began with this question: how can we push the relationship between human beings and nature and cross the different systems of communication inherent in technology and in living systems? In the resulting biological-technological network, living microorganisms, digital networks and artificial intelligence work together to disassemble literature on humanity’s relationship to landscape. Replicating the logic of what are considered “intelligent” microorganisms, the artists blur the limits between biological and artificial intelligences. Mapping and corrupting the predatory knowledge frameworks that have consistently driven how modern societies deal with nature, the goal is to learn from the bhiobrid interactions across biological, social and technical networks.
Location
ADM Gallery 2
About the Artist
Cesar & Lois is a collective that probes the evolution of humanity’s relationship to nature by advancing intersections between the parallel networks of technology, biological and societal systems. Cesar & Lois consists of Brazilian media artist Cesar Baio and California-based media artist Lucy HG Solomon, often in conversation and collaboration with other artists, scientists and researchers. Cesar Baio and Lucy HG Solomon work across disciplines at their respective universities, with Baio at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) and HG Solomon at California State University San Marcos (CSUSM). Formed in 2017, Cesar & Lois has launched a number of projects that reorient technology and society to living systems. The duo is currently working with the microbiological colonization of human knowledge systems through the merging of those living networks and Internet-based communications.