Mental Machine: Labor in the Self Economy, 2022, is a live performance by Kawita Vatanajyankur in collaboration with Pat Pataranutaporn of Fluid Interfaces at MIT Media Lab. Commissioned by the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Simon Lee Foundation’s Institute for Contemporary Asian Art, Mental Machine explores the concept of work in our current era of accelerated technological advancements.
In Mental Machine, Vatanajyankur becomes a human-machine hybrid as she embodies two cybernetic alter egos – each uniquely programmed with different beliefs and ways of thinking. Pataranutaporn created this cybernetic self through the poetic deployment of an AI-generated character pipeline using the artist’s personal data. In doing so, Vatanajyankurs’ mind and body are guided or manipulated by her cybernetic self to draw a massive, graphic textile pattern across the gallery floor.
The performance is a response to the rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, which are training machines to think, speak and work like humans. By positioning people… View full description
Mental Machine: Labor in the Self Economy, 2022, is a live performance by Kawita Vatanajyankur in collaboration with Pat Pataranutaporn of Fluid Interfaces at MIT Media Lab. Commissioned by the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Simon Lee Foundation’s Institute for Contemporary Asian Art, Mental Machine explores the concept of work in our current era of accelerated technological advancements.
In Mental Machine, Vatanajyankur becomes a human-machine hybrid as she embodies two cybernetic alter egos – each uniquely programmed with different beliefs and ways of thinking. Pataranutaporn created this cybernetic self through the poetic deployment of an AI-generated character pipeline using the artist’s personal data. In doing so, Vatanajyankurs’ mind and body are guided or manipulated by her cybernetic self to draw a massive, graphic textile pattern across the gallery floor.
The performance is a response to the rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, which are training machines to think, speak and work like humans. By then positioning humans as “mental machines,” the artists pose many interrelated questions that shape our collective future: when we teach machines to become human, are we recreating ourselves to become more like a machine?; If AI algorithms can influence human behavior by exploiting human bias and manipulating our emotions, can we really choose freely?; Is it possible to break the cycle of unconscious self-objectification and dehumanization that drives society?
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