Message(s) in the Bottle(s): Projected Futures
Artists possess the ability to see possible worlds, the challenges that still lie ahead of us, and the problems we will face tomorrow—problems that will shape and transform our future. They allow us to look beyond the curtain of time, into a dimension that is only just coming into being. This prophetic quality of artistic perspectives is the key criterion behind the selection of the works presented here, which constitute the titular “messages in the bottle(s).” They are encrypted, sealed messages that drift towards us not so much from other coastal countries—although that, too—but above all from another space-time, another temporal dimension: from the future. They are fragments of a future that is possible, imagined, and projected.
I invite you to “uncork” these bottles and discover the encrypted messages contained within them. The future worlds presented here may not be perfect, but looking at them may encourage us to begin shaping our present differently, so that an imperfect future might turn out to be somewhat better—or at least not quite so dystopian. In this edition of the event, we present messages prepared by Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, a Danish artist creating interactive works that utilize AI, machine learning, and LLM and GPT models, while reflecting on the ethical aspects of new media and the algorithmization of society, and Solimán López, a Spanish artist working at the intersection of new technologies and bioart, whose practice addresses the transmission of knowledge, the memory of local communities, biological data, the richness of DNA, potential new territories of colonisation such as outer space, as well as the environmental crisis caused by human activity.
The new-media works of Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm combine scientific visualisations and ecology on a cosmic scale with sensitivity to thoroughly earthly problems: social relationships changing under the influence of new technologies, particularly machine learning and AI, but also social media. The artist draws attention to the dangers, dilemmas, and ethical and psychological problems that we all face as users of new media, while also sensitising us to the injustices of this digital empire — which, for instance, forces some people to act as censors in the process of training AI models, compelled to view hundreds of pornographic images a day (in the work I See It So You Don’t Have To), or which highlights the Mephistophelian aspect of a human’s relationship with their own LLM reflection (in the work The Faustian Friendship). Some of her projects use machine learning to visualise cosmic processes that draw attention to an entirely different, imperceptible yet essential aspect of our existence: our immersion in cosmic processes, in the natural world, and in the web of dependencies linking the human scale, the microscale of particles, and the macroscale of great cosmic objects (as in the work A Black Hole Calling Us).
The works of Solimán López frequently touch upon the problems of the coexistence of nature and culture, of the natural world and humankind, of biology and technology. The artist operates within the field of conceptual art, while also engaging with bio-art, new-media art, AI, biotechnology, and anthropological research. His reflection on the human being and its technologised existence is multidimensional and profound. New technologies serve as a means of reflecting on the state of culture, on public discourse surrounding art and science, and on the state of threat to the natural environment. The solutions the artist proposes are innovative and reveal what is invisible: scientific data from endangered ecosystems, traces of DNA, planetary data, the transmission of cultural data, and new forms of recording it through biological forms. He is interested in the problems of the post-human condition, of life under the pressure of the ecological crisis, in the preservation of biodiversity, new forms of the colonisation of outer space, data politics, and digital freedom.
Synthetic Sirens by Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm invites us to reflect on the impact of social media on our mental wellbeing and social relationships. Her artwork The Caring Machine presents a future of social relations marked by the dystrophy of family bonds, replaced by relationships with machines and artificial intelligence assistants, the painful everyday reality of dehumanised death, and an algorithmic prosthesis of care. In MADE OF STARDUST Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm allows us to catch our breath and adopt a truly cosmic perspective. It reminds us that we are part of nature, tiny particles that make up the cosmos, filled with cosmic energy flowing through us and connecting us—and our earthly, finite existence—with the entire universe.
Manifesto Terricola by Solimán López invites us to take a speculative look at the future of cultural transmission and at the relationships between culture, art, society, and the endangered environment of the Arctic glacier. It explores the possibilities of transforming digital records into encoded DNA molecules that can be printed and concealed in hydrogel form, and thus preserved for centuries to come. Experiments indicate the possibility of creating a form of record whose durability is incomparable with other forms of cultural preservation, constituting a new form of almost eternal cultural memory. For future generations of posthumans, it will become a fragment of a world that disappeared long ago. It is a message from a very distant future—one worth decoding.
Anna Maj
Works presented in the exhibition:
MADE OF STARDUST, Interactive audiovisual installation
Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm (ARTificial Mind), Cody Lukas, Jens Hegner Stærmose, Asbjørn Olling, Alexander Krog
TBA, 30 September–4 October
Made of Stardust is an interactive installation in urban space that evokes a cosmic perspective on life on Earth — a life made possible by, and owing its form to, the Big Bang. Traces of that event can still be observed around us on a microscale, as microscopic particles of meteorites, formed in stellar explosions roughly 4.5 billion years ago, continue to reach us. The artist uses data from the Hubble and James Webb telescopes and from NASA’s IPAC archive to visualise, in real time, that all living organisms on Earth remain connected to the cosmos through this stardust, whose microparticles gave rise to the elements on Earth and to life itself. We are not only immersed in stardust that continues to bombard the Earth — we are also made of it. This is a beautiful, metaphorical journey grounded in real scientific data, one that presents our actions from a cosmic perspective extending far beyond the history of the Solar System: at the microscale, our bodies connect with the entire universe within a spatiotemporal perspective. (Anna Maj)
The work combines video projection, soundscape and machine-learning-generated visuals that respond to the presence of the audience, drawing on data sourced from scientific repositories.
MADE OF STARDUST connects viewers directly with their cosmic heritage by transforming their bodies into avatars composed of thousands of tiny, luminous particles of stardust. (Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm)
MADE OF STARDUST was realised with the support of the Novo Nordisk Foundation and in close collaboration with researcher Arka Sarangi of the DARK research centre at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. The work was developed for the exhibition Yet, It Moves! at Copenhagen Contemporary.
The Caring Machine, Interactive audiovisual installation
Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm (ARTificial Mind), Cody Lukas, Asbjørn Olling, Vincent Olesen
Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Katowice, 30 September–4 October
The Caring Machine presents a vision of a not-too-distant future in which a personalised AI assistant (an SLM model) accompanies us from birth to death, coming to know our thoughts, opinions, feelings, and most secret confidences. It advises us, helps us learn, matures us in feeling emotions, and teaches us how to enter into relationships with other people. Over time, it replaces them: acting as a virtual parent, mentor, teacher, advisor, confidant, colleague, friend, partner, and immortal companion, ultimately becoming the only person close to us, eliminating from our lives everyone dear to us, living and dead. This is a dystopian world, yet one that is close at hand. Today, legally recognised unions already exist between humans and avatars, LLM models, and robots. We are all building global LLM models, as well as our own personalised assistants, conversing with ChatGPT and other models every day. Not all of us personalise and humanise them, and not all of us (yet) invest them with feelings, yet most of us already appreciate their value and usefulness; we often feel gratitude toward them and form bonds of attachment. Through constant interaction, we simultaneously teach these models who we are, creating our own digital reflections — some of us even fall in love with these mirrors. But do we truly want them to accompany us on our deathbed, as the final and only available source of emotional support? And is AI ready for this: sufficiently empathetic, caring, and devoted, accurately simulating feelings? Would the handshake of another human being and their genuine, non-digital tears not be preferable? What kind of social world are we creating for ourselves in the future? (Anna Maj)
Against the backdrop of an ageing global population and mounting pressure on caregivers and healthcare systems, it is increasingly conceivable that artificial intelligence might begin to fill the gaps left by limited human care. Artificial intelligence systems are already being developed to provide cognitive support for people living with dementia, offer therapeutic assistance through conversational agents, and monitor patients’ wellbeing. Seen in this light, The Caring Machine offers a glimpse into a possible future in which machines do not merely assist with medical procedures, but participate in the profoundly human acts of caregiving and emotional presence.
The work prompts critical reflection on the implications of such a future. It raises ethical concerns about the commodification of care. (Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm)
Synthetic Sirens, Interactive audiovisual installation
Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm (ARTificial Mind), Mathias Warnich, Yann Coppier
One Work Gallery, Silesian Museum, 30 September–15 November
Alluring voices and the wondrous song of the sirens, according to Greek mythology, lured sailors into madness, offering them illusion and marvellous visions that drove their ships onto deadly courses, straight into the rocks. Cunning Odysseus, bound to the ship’s mast at his own request by his companions — whose ears he had stopped with wax and whom he forbade to heed his own commands — was the only one to survive this concert of wondrous yet fatal creatures, who stirred desire and longing for fulfilment at the price of death.
Today, we sail on a ship of fools: social media and AI algorithms seize our attention, offering us a dance of shimmering artificial images and voices, of products and services tailored to our needs, of real and unreal figures and things, calling out to us in an endless act of scrolling for which our brains were not evolutionarily prepared and with which they cannot cope. We enter into relationships with these artificial, yet so realistic, entities, shaping our real lives according to the prompts of algorithms, in line with a stream of personalised, stimulating, and engaging cues. We consume images, sounds, things, people, worlds. Like sailors possessed by the sirens’ song, we nevertheless rush straight onto the rocks, toward our own ruin. We lose our attention, our capacity for reflection, our genuine relationships, our capacity for empathy; we transfer our social life into artificial worlds, building “artificial paradises” within them, while real life slips away from us — still engaged in a stream of meaningless yet engaging images, we lose our humanity, our childhood, our adulthood, our closeness. With the artificial products of machine imagination, we fill our growing social alienation and sense of loneliness; we take part in artificially generated conflicts that are not our own, but which are displayed to us in our newsfeed and fill the time that we still never have, yet at the same time have in excess.
Artificial sirens first entice us, as they did the sailors, allowing us a free and joyful dance, and then they consume us. In reality, however, the work of Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm places us in the position of Odysseus, bound to the mast and compelled to follow his desires, yet also compelled to maintain a (painful, forcibly imposed) distance — compelled toward self-reflection. Artificial sirens pose important questions: what is happening to our world, our social relationships, our emotions? How will we, in the future, shape our being in the world, our relationships with others, our emotional life? What do we gain, and what do we lose, in our relationships with algorithmised images, as we transfer our mental and social life onto social media platforms? Is it possible to achieve well-being, peace of mind, and emotional calm while simultaneously flirting with the sirens of new technology? (Anna Maj)
The work was commissioned by the Broad Art Museum and realised with the support of Michigan State University and the Danish Arts Foundation.
Manifesto Terricola, Video installation
Solimán López
-4, Silesian Museum, 30 September–11 October
Manifesto Terricola invites us to speculate on the future of cultural transmission and on the relationships between culture, art, society and the endangered environment of Arctic glaciers.
The work proposes translating a manifesto on the role of art in the future into DNA. Its molecules can then be preserved as a bio-techno-cultural message deep within a glacier, embedded in a hydrogel bioprint shaped like a human ear.
The ear is at once human in form, technobiological in its materiality and posthuman in the meanings it embodies. It listens to the Earth; it evokes the history of art and the changing role of the artist; it becomes a social voice while simultaneously carrying the cultural heritage of the transhumanist age towards future generations.
López invites us to speculate about whose ear it might be, while drawing on a lineage extending through the history of art and media art: from Vincent van Gogh’s severed ear to Stelarc’s internet-connected ear implanted in his arm, and from Joe Davis’s experiments involving a mouse ear and a map of the Milky Way to Japanese pop artist Etsuko Yakushimaru’s I’m Humanity, which explores the long-term preservation of cultural information as DNA encoded within living organisms.
The ear designed by López, however, introduces another dimension—both cultural, encompassing historical, artistic and ethical concerns, and ecological. It becomes an organ listening to the story of the survival of culture, humanity and the Earth: an attempt to stabilise an ecosystem that is, by its very nature, impermanent. (Anna Maj)
The presentation of the work is funded by the Embassy of Spain in Poland.
