Cybernetic ecologies; art, nature and an interspecies future

One night, in the mid-1920s, British botanist Arthur Tansley dreamt of murdering his wife. 

Image credit: Cheng, Ian. 2015. Emissary Forks at Perfection (still). 2015-2016.

Image credit: Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation. 2008. Arthur George Tansley (1871–1955).

Unsettled by this unconscious apparition, Tansley sought the consult of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. 

During these sessions, Tansley became enwrapped by Freud’s idea that the human brain functioned as a machine — a network of electrical signals and responsive tissue which regulated the mind. Tansley saw a parallel to this in the natural world, a phenomena which he coined the ecosystem. He posited that the natural world, like Freud’s mechanical mind, was made up of regulatory feedback systems working toward ecological stability (the great universal law of equilibrium). While a revelatory concept for ecological science, this early conception of the ecosystem would come to haunt its very subject. 

Adam Curtis traces the consequences of Tansley’s subconscious anthropocentrism in his BBC documentary series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011). Tansley happened to exclude mankind from his equations, effectively overlooking the impact of humankind in the ecosystem’s ability to self-correct. The implication that nature would simply self-correct after sustaining damage, of human or natural causality, gave scientific licence to industrialists and colonists to ravage the earth’s natural systems throughout much of the 20th century.

Fortunately, by the 1970s Tansley’s anthropocentric ecology began to unravel through an unlikely synthesis of hippie environmentalism and computer science. Mediated by a shared interest in mind-expanding LSD, the peace-and-love hippies of the countercultural movement and the systems engineers of the computational revolution would come to commune in a shared vision of a harmonious oneness between man, machine, and nature. This utopian vision came to be known as Cybernetics. 

Cybernetics is a systems science devised by Norbert Weiner in which the systems of the human world were integrated with Tansley’s systems of the ecosystem, producing an all-encompassing diagram of planetary-scale feedback systems. Cybernetics considers the cause and effect of all natural, human, and artificial relationships, compiling everything from culture to weather, to technology and geology into a comprehensive model of a universal ecosystem. This profoundly non-anthropocentric conception of our planet’s ecosystem has enriched ecological discourse and paved a theoretical road for interspecies cohabitation. 

Though still only an emerging practice in societal planning and conservation, contemporary artists armed with Weiner’s cybernetic revelations have sought to propagate rich speculative futures of co-existence between human, non-human, and post-human organisms.

Pierre Hugyghe’s installation, After Alife Ahead (2017) is pure cybernetic theory in practice. Huyghe transformed an abandoned ice-skating rink into an ever-evolving cybernetic ecosystem. The geography of this ecosystem was cultivated by a topographic intervention of the site with the cement floor, partially demolished to reveal the geological undercurrent of human architecture. Imagining a fictitious re-wilding of the site, Huyghe then introduced a pair of chimaera peacock, a colony of bees, and algae into the space. Upon visiting the site, arts writer Hettie Judah observed that within a mere four months, both peacocks had disappeared and the bees had retreated from the site due to the cold, while a number of wild pigeons had taken nest alongside opportunistic weeds spilling in from the outside world. 

After initially installing the ecosystem of After Alife Ahead, Huyghe did not interfere, effectively handing the ecosystem’s self-determination back to the forces of nature. In doing so, Huyghe enacted a cybernetic flattening of interspecies hierarchies, erasing the bounds between human and natural space while rebuking the insistence on manipulating the flow of nature. After Alife Ahead also housed a complex cybernetic network of trans-species symbiosis, which profoundly enriched the entire ecosystem. This mutualistic system consisted of a number of aquariums (containing a sea snail, a Glo-Fish), medical incubators (containing HeLa cancer cells), a series of motion sensors, and an augmented reality app. The combined data output of these organisms and technologies dictated the opening and closing of automated roof hatches. In turn, these roof hatches determined the entire ecosystem’s exposure to exterior elements: rain, light, wind, and exterior temperatures, affecting every ecological function from algae bloom to species introduction. Huyghe’s integration of this cybernetic feedback system demonstrates the possibility of interspecies co-habitation, especially one mediated by emerging technologies. As Huyghe stated in an interview with Artnews, “There’s no master-slave” in this ecosystem, each organism is lent equal importance to the data algorithm manipulating their environment. 

The ecosystem of After Alife Ahead conceives a future worth considering, one in which the needs and desires of every organism are taken into account by humbled human stewards. A future in which emerging technologies could allow us to form beneficial relationships with non-human organisms. A future wherein we return to the flow of nature, lending it the knowledge and care of humankind while cultivating an abundant cybernetic co-existence for all forms of life.

While Pierre Huyghe is concerned with a material application of cybernetic ecosystems, Ian Cheng is fascinated by just the opposite. Cheng’s Emissary Forks at Perfection (2015- 2016) imagines a far-future wherein an AI-being enlists a mutant Shiba dog and its pack to study a resurrected 21st century human in a hope that the timeless companionship between person and dog will reveal the human’s inner world. Cheng’s narrative takes place within a live-simulated, virtual ecosystem. Aesthetically, it appears as if we are watching someone play a video game though there is no human participation, the characters here are operated by a cast of unique artificial intelligences. These intelligent agents, like the organisms of our own world, act upon their needs and desires, vying with one another toward their individual goals. 

Hosted on the videogame engine Unity, Cheng’s alien ecosystem plays out as a reflection of our own, shrinking the complex cybernetic systems of ‘real life’ into a compact, highly-legible microcosm of interspecies relationships. This shrinkage allows us, the viewer, to bear witness to chains of cause and effect equivalent in our own ecosystems, while also widening our narrative lens beyond anthropocentrism. Viewing Emissary, you may find yourself empathising with, rooting for or against certain canine agents as if it were an NRL match. This indirect, non-anthropocentric storytelling encourages an empathetic understanding of non-human consciousness. Like Huyghe, Cheng flattens the interspecies hierarchy and beckons us to find value in the animalistic behaviours and desires of these AI-Shiba-dogs. 

Applied to our material existence, this cognitive rewiring has the potential to motivate and facilitate broader interspecies co-habitation. A popular movement of trans-species understanding may profoundly enrich our relationship with the environment and our cohabiting organisms, providing an impetus to work with nature to achieve mutual prosperity. While illuminating our cognitive proximity to animals, Cheng also hints toward our proximity to artificial intelligences. The live and ‘living’ simulation of Emissary Forks at Perfection proposes the idea of a post-biological ecology, wherein forms of ‘life’ with cognitive and autonomous faculties may establish virtual ecosystems within technological infrastructure.  

This future is becoming an increasingly important concern with the widespread proliferation of algorithmic ecosystems and recent claims that a number of AI are developing toward low level consciousness, as with the recent developments of Google’s chatbot-generating system, LaMDA. Emissary Forks at Perfection  speculates a dual future, one containing a rich world of post-human cohabitation and the other, embodied solely in virtual realities. Both possibilities beckon us toward a radical reappraisal of anthropocentrism and preconceived notions of ecology.

Image credit: Carruth, Shane. 2013. Upstream Color (still). 2017.

Shane Carruth’s experimental film, Upstream Colour (2013) provides a unique imagining of the traumas and revelations we may face while transitioning to a non-anthropocentric society. To instantiate this, Carruth constructs an allegorical interspecies network of psychological symbiosis facilitated by a parasitic moth larvae.  When consumed, the parasite induces its host into a psychotropic hive-mind shared between the larvae/moths, the primary human hosts, and secondary pig hosts. This shared consciousness robs its hosts of individuality and connects them to a shared cybernetic network of collective identity, memory, biology and sensory faculties. 

The overarching narrative of this film follows the affected human hosts as they become entangled in this interspecies web of influence and navigate the trauma of adjusting to their new psychological realities. Unlike Cheng and Huyghe’s established non-human ecosystems, Carruth speculates on the process of psychological upheaval necessary for such an interspecies ecosystem to exist.  Upstream Colour’s narrative implies a difficult transition out of anthropocentric thought. The breakdown of interpersonal and interspecies hierarchies presents itself as both traumatising and profoundly enlightening, a radically honest prediction of this psycho-ecological shift. The film’s primary meta-textual reference is Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 novel (or manifesto), Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Thoreau’s text is a transcendental call to commune with the wild, to align the spirit of man with that of nature, in both a material and metaphysical sense. “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?” Thoreau asked. “Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?”Carruth’s honest but hopeful vision of interspecies mutuality encourages the viewer to consider the transitional difficulties of establishing such a relationship while also speculating on the transcendental benefits of a psychological shift toward non-anthropocentrism.

This handful of contemporary works regale a powerful counterpoint to Tansley’s anthropocentric ecology. Through these artists’ application of cybernetic philosophy and technologies, we are offered the possibility of a future in which the integration of man, machine, and nature may allow us to establish a mutually beneficial global ecosystem. An ecosystem wherein the hierarchies of species are erased and all life is lent a powerful self-determination. An ecosystem wherein we may all share an intelligence with the earth.