“Even a machine might ask itself if it is human and some machines may well be more human than people. The question ‘are we human?’ is from the beginning a hesitation about the relationship between ourselves and everything around or inside us.”

- Beatriz Coloumina, Mark Wigley, Are We Human? Notes on an archaeology of Design

 

“… first, the observers; second, the language they use; and third, the society they form by the use of their language.”

- Heinz von Foerster, Cybernetics of Cybernetics

 

Probe Series is a body of work that investigate the deeper logic of machine systems and how they might exist in physical environments and embed into machine-human social dynamics. Through a speculative approach, the artist examines how machine life might perceive and construct the world, and reinterpret what is sensed and encoded as information. Each installment of the series explores a distinct aspect of sensory perception, drawing inspiration from human sensory systems, such as vision, hearing, and touch. In this process, human perceptive models are transformed into machine perceptive models, which in turn deconstruct and reconstruct human culture. 

 

On a broader level, this series of works explores machine perception as an alien epistemology enacted through computer vision, sensorimotor architectures, and cybernetic coupling, revealing how artificial observers generate worlds structured by their own inferential logics. These machine beings operate simultaneously as observers of human activity and active participants within human social networks. This series is a study of the interrelationship between human-machine societies and how our technologies reflect and imitate us. This work extends theories of second-order cybernetics and cognitive assemblages, showing how meaning emerges through recursive interactions among human and nonhuman perceivers.

 

Probe I, Averso Specillo Di Ducendum

 

Probe I, Averso Specillo Di Ducendum, is the first installment of the Probe Series. This work presents a version of the artist’s imagination of post-planetary machine life, where alien machine life forms observe, document, and analyze the strange phenomenon of life on earth. In this first installation, the artist focuses on computer vision and intelligence. The installation tracks human and object data in the immediate space around it, including presence and movement. This stream of sensory information is fed into a machine learning model developed by the artist, which attempts to process, classify, and make meaning from what it encounters. The exhibition space is transformed into a field of perception, where the human and machine participate in recursive, reciprocal inference. 

 

This work was commissioned and collected by UNArt Center in Shanghai, China in 2019.