Inspired by experiments in interspecies communication and aspiring to connect with a world beyond our consciousness, nimiia cétiï documents the interactions between a neural network, audio recordings of early Martian language, and footage of the movements of extremophilic bacteria. Here, the computer is a medium, channeling messages from entities that usually cannot speak. However, it is also an alien of our creation. A collaboration with the artist Jenna Sutela as part of her n-dimensions artist-in-residency at Somerset House Studios on which I acted as mentor, with Damien Henry from Google Arts & Culture.
Using state of the art technology – in this case – Deep Learning (Artificial Intelligence) – we give a bowl of bacteria, a voice, translating the movements and spatial configurations into sounds and symbols. Nimiia cétiï builds upon the works of the 19th century French medium Hélène Smith – known by the Surrealists as “the Muse of Automatic Writing”. Amongst other things, she would enter a trance, and communicate with a distant civilization on the planet Mars. She would channel their thoughts and receive messages in what she believed (or claimed) was their native language, Martian. And she spoke, and wrote poems in this language, a so-called glossolalia. In our work, the computer is a shaman of the modern times, a medium receiving and articulating messages from entities that cannot otherwise speak to us. We work with the extremophile bacterium Bacillus subtilis which, according to recent spaceflight experimentation, could survive on Mars. It could be the native Martian. And it could be trying to say something.
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Acknowledgements
Commissioned by Somerset House Studios and Google Arts & Culture.
Thanks to Kieran Bates from the Institute of Zoology at Imperial College London, Adam Laschinger for sound recordings, and Manus Nijhoff and Leith Benkhedda for 3D work. The video includes music with Miako Klein in contrabass recorder and Shin-Joo Morgantini in flute, with sound production by Ville Haimala.
Created during my PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, funded by the EPSRC UK.
Related work
- Sounds made with Grannma
- Ultrachunk
- Deep Meditations