«Symbiotic AI»
The Tech industry increasingly relies on artificial intelligence for climate change solutions. Though most AI systems manifest as software machine learning algorithms, they depend on a ubiquitous hardware infrastructure requiring constant maintenance and temperature control. Given sufficient data, how would an AI compute its existence? Symbiotic AI tried to answer that question by investigating the dynamics between the infrastructure of AI and its surrounding ecologies.
The project consists of a role-play workshop and a simulated environment based on the workshop outputs. In this fictional scenario, an artificial intelligence agent tasked with weather forecasting starts to form symbiotic relationships with the ecosystem around it. The agent monitors the complex dances of codependency from the vegetation, animals, micro-organisms, and human workers surrounding its data center infrastructure, gaining dynamic, adaptive, and hyper-local insights. Each of the entities in the ecosystem negotiates with the AI in turn, coming up with new patterns to cope with the turbulent seasons. Through algorithmic storytelling, Symbiotic AI paints a possible future of a fragile symbiosis assisted by computation.
Biography
Iris QU Xiaoyu (b. 1993, China) is an artist and technologist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work engages with the speculative, political, and poetic aspects of technology. Her work has been exhibited at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, By Art Matters in Hangzhou, and Chronus Art Center in Shanghai.