Intelligent Terrain

Just as we inhabit our physical bodies, we inhabit landscapes and live within and from them. We have seen the impact of failing to acknowledge our entanglement with natural systems. From stone tablets to silicon chips, intelligent machines are not further away from the land than an engraved piece of stone. To varying degrees, we are organized by our landscapes, and how might land inform AI’s development and our responses to it? How might we change the focus of surveillance from monitoring and control to understanding the relationships among people and environments? How might traditional knowledge and stewardship underpin ethical AI?

According to legal scholar and member of the Chippewa of the Nawash First Nation John Borrows, in oral and visual cultures, law flows from the people and from the natural world and is reflected in the artistic and physical world. To imagine ourselves as disentangled from our landscapes creates the conditions for the evacuation of these spaces. How might an ethic of stewardship, centered in natural environments, suggest developmental pathways for AI and responses to its excesses?

UKAI Projects led a land-centered residency drawing on terrain near Wakefield, Quebec. During this residency, interdisciplinary artists individually and (where safe) collectively explored cognitive technology’s relationship to land and imagined approaches that bring us into a closer relationship with our environment while working toward the preservation of our world for future generations.

Most discourse tacitly or explicitly positions human beings, their relationships, and the environments they inhabit as ‘objects’ of ethical systems, algorithmic decision making, corporate action, and government regulation. Our cultural life extends from how we experience ourselves and how we experience others. AI amplifies and distorts what we actually and potentially experience.

Reimagination is possible.

Our experiences establish the ideas we can draw upon. AI has no body, no physical environment organizing its development, and no culture to weave and reweave into social life.  There is no ‘dark matter’ for the machine to draw upon and our algorithmic culture is increasingly asking us to ignore our own semantic contexts. By (re)inhabiting the body, the land, and our cultures we might imagine a new ethics for algorithms and support others to appreciate the path we find ourselves on.

Land:

From the rare earth metals extracted for our devices to the displaced Rosetta Stone that helped decode a long-lost language, the modern technologies and “discoveries” organizing our lives have always been built on the exploitation of land, its materials, and the ecological contexts from which people draw meaning.

Land became property, something that can be owned and thereby exploited.

The scientific instruments that enable us to feed our curiosities were perfected and came to map and measure the world with ever more precision. When we look up at night sky, the constellations we used to draw meaning from are obstructed by a network of devices looking down at us. Every inch of the Earth is threatened with observation, surveillance and monitoring. The more we know, the more we can “own”.

Digital isn’t a new place to discover new dreams. We bring our burdens with us.

The internet is born of land, water, and the sky. The “cloud” is nothing more than 400 or so underwater cables and multiple data centers scattered across the landscape. The GPS system is a network of satellites traversing the night sky, underpinning the infrastructures for real-time maps and autonomous vehicles.

Body:

Salmon carried from the river by bears eventually become a part of the forest as their nitrogen is taken up by the trees. The bodies of fish become entangled with the landscape. Cycles of being consumed and becoming another body may seem morbid or no longer the concern of human societies. However, by distancing ourselves from these cycles, we become less able to appreciate intelligence(s) present in bodies outside of our own. Artificial intelligence is a set of systems designed without a body. It relies on precision instruments, massive datasets, and abstracted moral and ethical constraints to feel and sense the world for it.

Artificial intelligence and automated systems of our modern life are modeled on a narrow understanding of intelligence, one that does not take into account the senses of the body and the existence of the flesh. As our devices tend to serve as extensions of our bodies, to see, to sense, to interpret the world, and to make decisions for us, what signals do our devices amplify and how will they further alter our experiences of the world we inhabit?

Movement:

First, there is an exodus from the real to the digital. Then, there are migrations from platform to platform as these digital spaces become hostile, uninhabitable, or utterly unwelcoming like a shopping mall parking lot at night.

Moving around digitally, like moving around in real life, is easier for some than others. Digital borders become less and less permeable. People are simultaneously being kept out, and locked in. Exactly where can we escape to next? Migration isn’t just life on the move, but also how we make a home for ourselves and those we love and care for.

Intelligent Terrain explores the landscape of the Outaouais region. It is hosted near  Wakefield, QC, in Canada, in an area formerly covered by the Champlain Sea about 130,000 years ago, before the current fluvial systems in the Ottawa valley began to form at the end of the last ice age. The Champlain Sea, once an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean, left deposits of marine life, minerals, and land forms carved out by the retreating glaciers over deeper ecological time. Through archeological excavations, we learn about land that once was sea. The deposits from the sea gave life to the ecosystems through its rich soils, and paved the way for modern agriculture’s extractions from this land. The landscape and the changes it has endured continue to organize  the lives inhabiting this particular place.

Intelligent Terrain is an exercise in drawing attention to the mutilation of the natural world caused by our pursuit of scale and, through the creation of artifacts and objects of value, the commodification of what remains.