Case Study: Remixing Knowledge with Layered Intelligences

Abstract

The case study of Degenerative Cultures explores how the layering of different forms of logic offers an opportunity for rethinking our human systems and hypothetically remixing the epistemological roots of society—through interventions into our technological systems. In Degenerative Cultures, the living organism Physarum polycephalum partners with an artificial intelligence that compiles and corrupts an archive of human texts. In the iterative art installation, which incorporates the growth cycles of microbiological organisms, protists as well as fungi cover up and effectively remix human texts. Human knowledge, contained within the philosophy books used in the project, becomes the substrate for organic growth. The living organisms grow over an actual book, and the AI, referred to as a “digital fungus,” corrupts texts on the Internet. The artists’ experiment, which links microbiological growth logic to artificial intelligence, is one step in rethinking how human knowledge may become layered and ultimately corrupted and rerouted—a forking of sorts—through integration with nonhuman logic systems, including microbiological and artificial intelligences. By orienting this work to remix theory, the article offers the hypothesis of a multispecies recombination that could, in utopian terms, reformulate the epistemological basis of modernity. In order to pursue this hypothesis, the art collective Cesar & Lois asks what role remix plays in the ongoing emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning.