🜃 i : Towards Earthly Technosymbiogenesis

Through experimental film, 🜃I prototypes possible roles of AI in reforming human ⇄ environment interaction through both social metabolism and social imaginaries. Rather than unfolding an overt narrative, the future fiction will enfold viewers in a filmic experience that cascades across scales, materialities, and unwelts — imaged through diverse techniques. Here, some first fragmentary sketches, initial points of a growing constellation, are presented; ultimately, viewers would encounter the project as an immersive video installation.

Critiques of present-day AI include: bias in algorithms and datasets, reliance on poorly paid human labor, massive energy needs, and the environmental impact of producing or disposing of computer hardware. These critiques rightly raise concerns AI will perpetuate coloniality and extractive capitalism, accelerating systems of inequity and exploitation of people and planet. Unsurprisingly, AI engenders dystopian future scenarios (though too often without regard to aforementioned critiques).

Can the development and application of artificial intelligence instead provide an opportunity to instill and install new earthly operating principles, incorporating the critiques of AI, and re-coding ecological and social values at various scales? If we cannot yet see the way, can filmic future fictions help open new pathways for the imagination?

Brains emerged from the Earth, through evolutionary processes driven in part by changing climate and shifting landscapes. AI operates on substrates extracted from the same Earth — landscapes reorganized — base materials transformed into semiconductors, imparting an inherently alchemical aspect. (The inverted A-like form 🜃 is the alchemical symbol of the earth element; 🜃I thus suggests “earthly intelligence.”) AI is used to recognize and predict patterns, including patterns in Earth systems and brain activity. While these applications of narrow AI remain unconnected, might they be integrated? What would it be like to encounter such an intelligence?

Currently, industrial technologies, including AI, occupy a parasitic place within planetary metabolism. Is it possible to intervene, to imagine and image a partnership, and alter AI’s developmental trajectory towards a symbiogenesis between the technosphere, geosphere, and biosphere?

🜃I is proposed as a working concept, departing from these questions, but deliberately open-ended in order to allow a process-oriented approach, leaving space for ongoing conversation and collaboration with academic and scientific interlocutors to feed into the project.