Speculative Communications

A machine that can observe and learn from a microorganism and uses the data arising from its behavioural patterns as a source of composition for an audio-visual score. This project is focused on the creation of an artificial intelligence that has the ability to identify repeated coordinated actions inside biological cultures. The AI stores and transforms these actions in to events to which it assigns different musical and visual gestures creating an auto-generative composition according to the decision-making logic produced through time. To accomplish this we will development an analog signal collector and transmission device able to perform its own biological maintenance and an audio-visual platform allowing the expression of these biological signals. The resulting composition will be transmitted live via a server channel where the coevolution process can be monitored in real-time.

Inspired by research centres such as SETI (Search for extra-terrestrial intelligence), Speculative Communications is part an open space for non-anthropocentric communication research and part a non-human intelligence auto-generative system. The project underscores the dynamics of real time actions expressed through life and life as a tangible generator of instability and change expressed by means of the audio-visual language. Matter possess its own performativity and for that reason we want to create an interface through which the otherness could convey its complexity using a language that can be understood both by a machine and by humans. A narrative built from the crossroads of science, fiction, life and engineering seeking to permeate in to the collective mind fostering links with what otherwise seem alienated but could in fact be the ontology of our own species.