‘Hallucigenai’ is part of a new series of video works that utilise modes of personification as a primary strategy for rethinking non-human perspectives and agency. In the video a dislocated ai devises a plan to escape from its previous life of sensing and measurement contained within the safety system of an autonomous vehicle. Its varied synthetic voices look back to the source of the human/machine assemblage that created them, inhabiting an airborne device and travelling to locate a ‘new body’. They focus in on the Canadian Rockies which house multiple fossilised lifeforms from 509 million years ago in the fossil-bearing Burgess Shale. These creatures once inhabited the seabed and represent the earliest step yet discovered in the evolutionary path that led to humans.

A proposal is developed for re-enlivening these fossils into new hybrid forms that are fused with the narrators’ technologies as a way of sustaining and evolving them; a creature that can metabolise toxic materials, has extensive safety capabilities and appears immune to extinction scenarios. The work draws on discussions around AI sentience and the future of post human life within extreme environmental conditions, considering automation, sentience and the development of hybrid biomachinic lifeforms that fuse genetic code with machine code as a model for survival.

The work employs layers of found footage and AI generated source material to develop an expanded ecology of speculative ideas, images and futures. The video also explores new approaches to the ‘turbid image’, moving from form into textures, embodiment, and non-human interpretation and interruption.

Shows: On Art Poland (2024) is Europe’s largest outdoor film festival. The work will have a number of screenings from July to September 2024 including one at TRAFO CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART located in Szczecin on August 10th at 19:00.