Abstract:
‘How to Wake Up the Ghosts’ is an immersive film installation that explores the thresholds of artificial nature and interconnectivity. Based on a 1756 publication in which whale hunters found a piece of coral near the Arctic, the piece presents a speculative future with remnants of human efforts to counter the global ecological crisis. The work reveals a truth that is made up of reconstructed pieces of coral and reflects on the blurred lines between ‘reality’, ‘nature’ and ‘technology’ from a more-than-human perspective. The voice of the coral takes you on a journey of reflection. As a plural entity, its being carries opposing perspectives on what it means to be alive in a neo-ecological world. The script is co-written by GPT-2 models trained on texts by a.o. Donna J. Haraway, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Jean Baudrillard and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The artifical coral imagery is created using a CLIP+VQGAN method in order to let the machine dream up the landscape, while its physical being is 3D-printed using PLA mixed with wood fibers.
Areas of STS Scholarship: Big Data, AI and Machine Learning, Queer and Trans STS, Environmental/Multispecies Studies
