Making Kin: Cells, Software, Synthetic Selves

In today’s episode, we are joined by artists Charlotte Jarvis and Zoran Srdić Janežič, and writer, educator, and curator Rick Dolphijn to discuss entities at the intersection of wetware, software, and hardware, and how they challenge our definitions of life, reproduction, parenthood, or care.

Resources:

Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family by Sophie Lewis
Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism by Silvia Federici
Testo Junkie by Paul Preciado
Humanistic Narratives by Michel Serres
Thumbelina: the culture and technology of millennials by Michel Serres
The Posthuman by Rosi Braidotti
Posthuman Feminism by Rosi Braidotti
Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway
The Philosophy of Matter: A Meditation by Rick Dolphijn

Revivification (Exhibition) by Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson and Matt Gingold
Ani Liu
Ai Hasegawa
Errorarium by Adam Zaretsky

(later edits, suggested by Zoran Srdić Janežič)
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
Dune by Frank Herbert
Southern Reach Series by Jeff VanderMeer
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast is part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport. Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

Transcript

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Welcome to The Digital Deal Podcast, the series where we talk about how new technologies reshape our democracies and how artists and critical thinkers can help us make sense of these changes. My name is Ana Carabelea, and today I am joined by Charlotte Jarvis, Zoran Srdić Janežič, and Rick Dolphijn.  

Charlotte works between art and science. She has recorded music onto DNA, seen her heartbeat outside of her body and grown her own tumour. Her work explores the future of reproduction and the body as a liminal space – a site for transformation, hybridisation and magic. Charlotte is currently engaged in making “female” sperm with scientists in Leiden and a “collaborative uterus” with a team in Argentina. She has exhibited internationally and currently lectures at The Royal College of Art in London.  

Zoran is a sculptor, intermedia artist, and puppet designer at the Ljubljana Puppet Theatre. His work employs new materials and technologies such as animatronics, moving mechanisms in conjunction with biological materials, 3D virtual design, and virtual or augmented reality installations. He has been exhibited internationally in numerous group exhibitions, including Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Bozar in Brussels, Centquatre in Paris.   

Rick is a writer, educator, and curator, serving as an Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Utrecht University. He published widely on continental philosophy and the contemporary arts. He studies posthumanism, new materialism, material culture (in particular, food studies), and ecology. His books include Foodscapes in 2004, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies with Iris van der Tuin in 2012.  

Thank you all so much for joining me. It's great to have you here. 

Zoran Srdić Janežič: Thank you. 

Rick Dolphijn: Thank you. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: In today's episode, we're going to examine this intersection between wetware, software, hardware, and the myriad debates it raises from who's considered sentient, who isn't, who has a right to life, who doesn't, what is life, who gives life, who cares for it, and has decision making power over it. As usual, I'd like to start with the artworks that Charlotte and Zoran have been developing during their residency because I believe they're great in challenging the terms in which we think about parenting, care, reproduction, as well as how we frame our relationships with other beings. I’ll pass on the mic to either Charlotte or Zoran. Who wants to start? 

Charlotte Jarvis: Shall I? So, the project is called In Loco Parentis, and the top line is that it's a collective artificial embryo model that's being parented by collaboratively trained artificial intelligence. 

Just to break that down a little bit, artificial embryo models are made by scientists because we're interested in studying the embryo. However, it's very difficult to study the embryo because you're not allowed to grow them past 14 days. These models are created by putting a group of stem cells together, doing a little bit of magic on them, and they start to behave in a similar way to an embryo, a foetus. They start to self-organize and create the structures of a foetus. These entities are being legislated for at the moment. So, the ethics around them is currently under quite hot debate. The reason why I'm asking a group of people to train an artificial intelligence to make ethical decisions for it is because, as I said, these entities are being legislated for at the moment, and a lot of different institutions and groups are putting themselves forward as the potential ethical arbiters of these technologies. And whilst in ethics committees, you know who is making the decision, you usually don't know how. An artificial intelligence is a tool that we can use, whereby we have to give it the moral framework that we want it to work by. Even if that is just to say we want it to represent the most number of people's views. You might also say, we want it to adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It gives us a way of really delving into and unpicking how we want these ethical decisions to be made by whom and under what kind of moral frameworks. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: So, when you say parenting, does that mean basically the decision-making? 

Charlotte Jarvis: Yeah, I'm playing with the idea of parents and donors. In our project, multiple people will be donating their genetic material to make the artificial embryo module. Normally, that would come from one person. It would effectively be a group of stem cells from one person making a clone. What's different and scientifically original about our project is that the artificial embryo model will be made from multiple people's cells. So, yeah, I'm kind of playing with the idea of parenting there and questioning whether you're a donor or a parent. And then in terms of saying that the artificial intelligence is parenting that entity. Because you can't grow them past a certain point at the moment, it's not literally parenting a baby per se, but it will be making the kind of decisions that we would normally ask parents to make: life and death decisions about how long something can be cared for and whether or not it should be terminated. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Zoran, do you want to walk us through your work? 

Zoran Srdić Janežič: This is a part of a bigger opus or project called Biobot. I should start with just a quick intro to the Biobot opus. The whole aim of the project is to create some cybernetic being through merging the organic and technological. In a way, I would say it's like a singularity of organical and technological. We started working in 2017 and till now it's all [been] just small steps toward the whole picture, or the whole robot, or the whole cybernetic being. At the beginning we started to work with induced pluripotent stem cells. The idea was, okay, let's connect the action potential of the differentiated neural cells to something that it's like a walking automaton or some mechanism. So [...] anything can be connected to this wetware. And through this we were developing what is motion and what is locomotion, how the robot is moving or how it is perceiving and moving through space. We came to the idea that if we continue like this, then we would say that actually it doesn't matter what is the body [of the biobot]. In a way, we try to focus on this question: does it really matter if we have stem cells that are made from my fat or the blood? We came across one program, RoboGrammar, a program that is automating or producing robotic structures based on the movement through different terrains. It has model predictive control, so whatever comes out of it, is maybe similar to the walking of the arthropods. The point of this program is that we tried to put away human intervention. The robots that are made move from trivial to non-trivial robots because they are more complex. The program itself creates the robots with different primitives, leg and appendages, limbs that can actually be built. So, we can try to focus and find a way for action potential of neural cells to come into the program and start to, not just control the movement of the robot left or right, but co-design the next robotic body. Then we decided to work on different parts of the program.  

The program was built [so] that there was a symmetry because it's related to the natural environment and because in nature the symmetry is enabling better movement. So, we said if we take out the symmetry and if we have like reward function for the better movement, the robot which would move better would be more or less symmetrical. But this one was different configuration of these bodies. We start to work with the program which is called Diversity Is All You Need (DIAYN). We still needed bodies because DIAYN makes whatever robot we put in [the program]. It's finding different movements or different behaviours of this robotic body. But in a way it's learning these different behaviours through the movement. We started with two robotic bodies, one was similar to a stick insect because it is similar to the one that could be made with the RoboGrammar but it's not made. If we want different bodies, we try to find a way back to the RoboGrammar that we can enable co-designing the body together with the cells. So one is similar to stick insect and another one, there was a suggestion that we took two robots, one had four legs, one had two legs and we combined it into one robot with six legs and then we divided it in half and made a circular body (each side had three legs). We tried to have a non-optimized version. It's something that DIAYN could actually learn more on its own. So, this is on artificial intelligence, but the better we are still working with the differentiation of the neural cells. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: So, if it doesn't learn through a reward system - which is something that we usually associate with machine learning, I think that's the most common - can you explain how it actually learns? What's the learning process? 

Zoran Srdić Janežič: Intrinsic motivation is part of this program. It doesn't have the reward system so it can create any behaviour of movement. In a way it just makes the movement by itself, it's just learning. One part that it's also in the process is part of the environment. Because in the RoboGrammar test that we did with the program, we found out that when we put the robot in the exhibition - we had to put it in some exhibition area which was quite small for the robot - it had some logic that we could not predict. And because it has this artificial wall inside the program, it actually built a snake body. So, it was very, very, very, very long robot or maybe this isopod with multiple legs so it could climb the wall and fall into infinity. It actually died. The program stopped there because the reward was to move forward. It climbed the wall and falling into infinity is the end of the program in a way. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Okay, fascinating. We'll try to wrap our heads around that. What I want to pick up on is this contribution that both of your work does to these debates around what is artificial, human or animal intelligence, as well as the challenge of these binaries between technology and nature, organic and machinic. There is quite a lot of fear, quite a lot of anxiety around these blurred boundaries. I wanted to hear from you – since you're obviously like both trying to touch on that - but I wanted to hear also from Rick, where you think these fears stem from? And how might we reframe these debates so that we have more productive conversations about these blurred boundaries and what they might mean to us, and how they might actually be a very productive, positive questioning of things. 

Rick Dolphijn: What I'm interested in here are the concepts that are being used. Of course, it has to do with rethinking the idea of individuality, personhood, subjectivity, and in what way caring takes place. The moment that individualities or subjectivities get more intelligent or understand better what brings them joy and what brings them sorrow... I'm using now words which are from Spinoza, 17th century philosophy, who talked about individualities and who talked about what moves them. And so, individualities in his sense are always drawn to joy and move away from sorrow.  

The moment this gets more and more complex, of course, then you see unpredictable behaviour. Unpredictable behaviour means nothing more than this thing is getting intelligent. So, when we talk about a tick, for instance, a very simple creature, the behaviour is quite predictable. When it gets more intelligent, when we talk about, for instance, an octopus, a very intelligent creature, the different type of intelligence than ours, by the way, then you see that its behaviour becomes much more complex and its idea of what is joy and what is sorrow becomes much more complex. 

So, when we think about artificial intelligence, I don't see a radical difference between bodies made from flesh or bodies made from words or electronic impulses. In the end, they're just bodies. Bodies means always a complex of other bodies that somehow act together and that want to stay together and thus are in search of joy and move away from sorrow. 

The moment this gets more and more complex, of course, it gets more and more interesting. I'm definitely interested in seeing how care and subjectivity are nowadays being explored in the arts and how artists, but also visitors are involved in finding out how this whole process works - of individuation, subjectivity and also caring. Especially the last question, when it comes to Charlotte’s work, is, of course, super important. It links not only to questions that are posed in science and technology studies, but also in feminism, in the works of Donna Haraway [where] the word caring is super important. In the end, it doesn't really matter whether we talk about artificial beings or fictional entities or books, whatever. It's all about how individualities, how subjectivities work and the kind of agencies that they work with. I think these are both very interesting experiments where we can see this at work. 

Charlotte Jarvis: I'd like to pick up on this topic of care and link it back, Ana, to your original question about why we have this kind of fear over these entities. I think a lot of our fear comes from our suspicion that we have an inability to parent these entities. You know, they quite neatly fall into the Frankenstein archetype, right? If we look at artificial embryo models, also if we look at artificial intelligences, if we look at artificial bodies, these are forms that are constructed to, in some way, mirror our own humanity, whether that be our consciousness or our literal bodies or the first stages of when life begins. Just like in the story of Frankenstein, we're frightened that we're going to care for these entities insufficiently and that thus we become the monster through our inability to care for these entities and through our inability to control them. I think that's kind of interesting because I'm a parent, currently have a four-year-old and an eight-month-old and it really strikes me as a process of ... it's like a slow goodbye, right? They start off literally part of you, so connected to you, even once they're out of your body physically you feel like your minds are kind of melded together and then slowly, they walk away. And you want them to walk away, you want them to move away from you. But I think with these kind of constructed entities, this is the bit that we're worried about. You know, these are the apocalypse scenarios of AI running out of control or making full babies in inverted commas from artificial embryo models. I think there's something really interesting in us thinking about that with relation to parenting and thinking that really this is about what we want our relationship to them to be. 

The other thing I wanted to pick up on was this question of the individual. Because I think the other thing that scares us about these entities that are being posed by science and technology is that they really challenge traditional definitions of what it is to be a human. I think those definitions are increasingly being challenged. We talked about Donna Haraway, but also many, many theorists are really focusing on this idea that we are a system, that we are multitudes from our microbiome all the way to our social structures. Even in nanobiology, this idea that we don't have a defined edge to our bodies, our bodies are not vessels at all. Feminism obviously touches upon that a lot because female bodies are famously leaky vessels. So, that idea of that sealed, hermetic, perfect vessel is being critiqued by many of these different theories. I think these entities fit within those critiques because they don't fit in with a traditional definition of what it is to be a human. They [these entities] clearly feel a bit like it, and therefore they really challenge us to redefine ourselves and to think about what we might want to be as well. Rather than that idea of the kind of predetermination, a human is a sacred thing that is and has always been the same, ultimately defined in the image of God. They're challenging us to design ourselves anew. And I think that is frightening. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: In a way, it’s the perfect example of the uncanny. 

Charlotte Jarvis: Exactly. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Rick. Sorry, go ahead. 

Rick Dolphijn: Can I add a few words? Because, of course, this is also very intriguing for me and has a lot to do with how contemporary posthumanist theory is developing. It really is a move away from how humanism and the kind of oppositions that were so dominant in dualism, how that has also shaped our idea of the self and of the other over the past few hundred years. This, of course, needed a very strong feminist movement in order to understand that this kind of idea of the human is by all means very white, very male, very heterosexual. This whole process - and this has been going on for the past 20 years at least - this whole process of moving away from this humanist bias is, of course, important. And nowadays - and this is of course also intriguing for artificial intelligence – it means that throughout academia, people are rethinking these oppositions. I just mentioned the intelligence of the octopus. I mean, even 30 years ago, people would never talk about the intelligence of the octopus because it had no brains. Even 20 years ago, in a journal like Nature, there was a fierce discussion about how it is possible that a creature without a brain can think. And nowadays, luckily, we start getting more liberal about what thinking is and what subjectivity is. And we try to understand the complexity of other forms of being. That means that we, even when we look at ourselves, we don't limit the idea of thinking to the brain. It is really an embodied being that we are. 

I'm sure these are also the kind of questions that both Charlotte and Zoran are struggling with when we talk of machine intelligence. Because in the earlier phase, of course, machine intelligence, Moravec was the first I think... well there was an interesting guy who thought let's just slice up the brain in pieces and get it into the computer and then you live on forever. Which nowadays is a pretty weird idea, I would say. It has nothing to do with how we see intelligence as an embodied state of being, which does not even stop with the borders of one own body. So, machine learning and machine intelligence are very complex themes. Therefore, the term of care is crucial. So how can we think of care, motherly care, but also the care of machines for other machines? How can we think that? And how can we also learn something about the non-human world? 

Charlotte Jarvis: I think we see this move away from the human centric, you know, in an obvious way within arts education. When I started teaching in higher education, we talked a lot about human-centered design. That's like a dirty word now. You would never say human-centered design. You would say non-human-centered design. That's what everybody's interested in now. And that's happened in the last decade. So, I think that really bears out. And as you said, I must have had five students who've done projects about octopi in the last four or five years. So, I completely concur. There has been like a massive shift that goes with that. People becoming very conscious of that idea of the Anthropocene and of critiquing the human. That's something we have really seen, you know, even in popular culture. In the Three Body Problem, this idea of being very critical of humanity is explored and that's obviously a massive piece of popular culture. One of the characters literally betrays the whole human race because she is so distraught about what we've done to ourselves and our planet. She invites the aliens to come and take over. I think all of these ideas have been coming up kind of in the last 10 to five years. And they're the context by which all of these projects get made. They're also, I think, the context by which we fear these entities, because as I said, we don't feel that we are responsible enough to bring them into existence. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: So many routes I can go down now, but I'm going to try and stick to one. Back to this idea that Charlotte mentioned about the slow goodbye. You're both using your own cells to create this new entity, this new life form. I want us to maybe explore a bit what would be some ways of describing the relationship that you have with this entity in terms that also help us process through what the individual is, what subjectivity is and so on. 

Zoran Srdić Janežič: Maybe related to this fear. As both Charlotte and Rick said, it's related to an attachment to this Enlightenment era, to humanism. It's anthropocentric and the human is divided from nature or from the machine through reason. In a way, there are these binaries that we try to challenge. It's not the reason of a human, but it's actually the intelligence that was part of the human and it's outside of the body. It's like in vitro grown tissue. In a way, it's losing control. It's maybe all this fear that we don't have control over intelligence anymore, but it's not the fear of the different intelligence of different agents. It's maybe that we don't have central point in a way. We are talking about some interdependencies or some environments or in a way this care. The actual question is trying to put the human outside of the design. The design is made by artificial intelligence or the wetware of invitro intelligence. So, what is the human in this project? It's not the author anymore. Maybe it's a collaborator or it's just somebody who's taking care of the project. 

Rick Dolphijn: Can I add something to this interesting perspective also in relation to parenting. Somehow, I keep coming back to parenting, probably also because Charlotte mentioned it. My kids are a bit older than yours, Charlotte. It's also about letting go. It's also about the fear of are they able to build up their own lives? Right? It's a question that you ask in a further stage. That's, of course, a very important question to ask when you talk about individuality and about subjectivity. I'm not very much a fan of a term like consciousness, which has always been used by philosophers. Again, I would like to go back to Spinoza in that sense, who makes a very simple definition of individuality, saying that any individual consists of a series of individuals ad infinitum. It's always a cluster of things. Then he says that this cluster somehow wants to persevere in being. So, it searches for ways to persevere in being by being attracted to joy and by moving away from sorrow. Any kind of entity, any life form that keeps on living and that feeds itself, that reproduces, found a way to persevere in being. This is also what parenting is all about. You try to teach them stuff, and you don't understand these kids at all, by the way. I've come to accept that, which is fine, because it's a new type of life, a new generation, a new era, a new way of setting up a life, a new way of recognizing joy and recognizing sorrow, which is different from mine - which is fine - which you first don't recognize, which also gives you fear. Then you think, okay, well, somehow they managed to survive, they don't have to live the life that I lead. They can search for themselves. These are questions that we also have to ask with artificial intelligences. Are they able to persevere in being? Are they able to find out what is good for them and move away from what is bad for them? And that's also why the project of Zoran is also interesting, because you do not work with a human who projects the idea of parenting and of care onto these computer intelligences, but you use a computer itself or a construction which is automated to reflect upon subjectivities. It would be interesting to see if something comes out of this which is able to persevere in being, which kind of gets an idea of what is good for it and what it has to avoid. 

Charlotte Jarvis: I really love this broad idea of the pursuit of joy as a way of thinking about life. It's quite beautiful and a lot more optimistic than a lot of... I mean, we've already taken down Descartes and Hobbes and this kind of thing. But, yeah, it's a much more liveable version of defining life and defining humanity, perhaps, which I really, really love. You know, you asked us how we might define our own relationship to these entities. And in answer to that, I'm not sure. I've had very varying relationships with the things that I've grown, when I've grown them. There have been some that haven't touched me at all. And others that have really upset me, or I've felt very connected to. But the bit that I really wanted to pick up on is how s**t our language is at trying to define. I mean, English is almost too precise because you need words that are less defined, right? We need less kind of precise wording. I’m reading a book at the moment, it's a really great book called Full Surrogacy Now by Sophie Lewis. And she uses lots of different terms in it, but she borrows the term from someone else where she talks about the motherfoetus, one word, motherfoetus. I thought that was pretty good as a first step. I don't know, maybe German would be better, if we could construct words from multiple words. But yeah, I think this almost gets at the crux of it because the whole point of these entities is that they are difficult to define. They're difficult to categorize. Therefore, it is also by definition hard to define and categorize our relationship to them and to put it into precise language. I think it often - and I don't mean this to kind of get out of the question - but I think it can feel more like a feeling, like something that is more in your kind of lizard brain, than, to use a word that we maybe don't like, it is in your conscious brain. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: I hope I used the word describe and not define or name because I thought that is exactly the point of developing these entities, that they go beyond what we have names for and what is already defined into new territory of things that aren't defined yet. Before we end the conversation, I just wanted to ask if you have any recommendations for our listeners that might want to dive deeper into these topics. 

Charlotte Jarvis: We both mentioned Donna Haraway, obviously the queen of it all. Situated Knowledges, The Cyborg Manifesto, and there's so much work. If people were looking for texts that have come off that, I mentioned Sophie Lewis earlier, Full Surrogacy Now is a great text, but also Silvia Federici's texts about the body and capitalism, Paul Preciado has some incredible texts where he talks about the need for new forms of collaborative and collective reproduction and for democratizing things like uteruses and sperm and liquids and secretions. So yeah, all of those.  

In terms of artists, Ani Liu and Ai Hasegawa, just off the top of my head, are both amazing. 

Rick Dolphijn: I really like by the way that, okay, we use computers to talk with each other, but I see bookshelves everywhere. This is fantastic. On all four screens. 

Yeah, I'm personally at the moment also very much intrigued by the work of Michel Serre, a French philosopher who recently passed away, and who wrote some beautiful books. Now, quite a few of them are being translated into English or have already been translated: Humanistic Narratives is one of the last, and it talks about the heritage of humanism and how we deal with that need these days. He also has written quite a few interesting books, for instance, Thumbelina - also an English title - on how we deal with contemporary technology. Thumbelina is referring to how we use our thumb to navigate on our screens. That's the work of Michel Serre. Of course, Rosi Braidotti talks about the posthuman. It’s also a very interesting way of broadening this idea of posthumanism, so not only talking about technology, but also about species around us and about different types of knowledges that need to be taken into account. 

As for artists, what I also find interesting is the work of Adam Zaretsky. He made this installation called the Errorarium, which is on experimenting with plants and animals (zebrafish and algaes) where he invites the visitors to inject algae into zebrafish, which is, of course, a very questionable ethical enterprise. But as he's dressed up like a doctor and seems to speak the language of science, people do these very questionable ethical actions. And he adds to it that this is actually also being done in the labs of MIT and all that. Yeah, these are the ethical questions being asked. But more important in these artworks that we discussed today and in the discussion now is the issue of care. Of course, this is definitely something that needs to be further developed. 

Zoran Srdić Janežič: Yes, we were talking about Donna Haraway. Staying with The Trouble is something that touched me. It's about the cultivation of responsibility. It's not living with something, but she uses the term becoming with. It's talking about kinship in a broader sense, in a way that's beyond bloodline or species, but that we are all residents. 

About the artists, two weeks ago, Guy Ben-Ary and Nathan Thompson did exhibition in Perth. [It’s] a project that they have worked on for quite a long time. They used blood from Alvin Lussier, one of the last living musicians from the Black Mountain College. It's working with sound distillation, the information, how to make music from the bio indicators or biosensors and it’s called Revification. I think you can find it on YouTube. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Great, that's great. Thank you so much for today. It was great to have you. Such an interesting conversation. I've had a blast and learned a lot. 

Rick Dolphijn: Thank you, thank you. 

Zoran Srdić Janežič: Thank you. 

Charlotte Jarvis: Nice to see you all. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: That's it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and hope you enjoyed it. 

The Digital Deal Podcast is getting a makeover. We are joining forces with O1 to continue the work we’ve started here and bring you new episodes every month.   

Under the new name Art Is Not a Thing this series will be about art as a practice of critical inquiry, knowledge production and world-building.    

We want to thank Creative Europe and all our guests, all the artists and partners part of European Digital Deal, for supporting us thus far and promise to build on this legacy with the same commitment and curiosity.