“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.

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Probe II, Subaudition

 

“Subaudition: The act of understanding or supplying something not expressed, a reading between the lines.”

- Merriam Webster

 

Probe II, Subaudition is a binary set of machines that apply machine learning methods of speech to text recognition in exploring the concept of subaudition through the translation, degradation, and misinterpretation of meaning in spoken language to binary information, transmitted between the two machines and expressed as kinetic movement and signaling outputs of each of the machines respectively.

 

Machine I: Recognition. Decoding. Transmission.

The microphone on Machine I captures the human voice, environmental sounds, and directional position of the participants when motion in the environment is detected. It transcodes and packages up this information to transmit to Machine II for further interpretation.

 

Machine II: Receiver. Pattern Emitter.

Machine II collects and re-interprets the transmitted information, interprets it, and transforms it into non-verbal light projections into the space through a mirrored zoetrope projection mechanism.

 

The two machines together mimic the human ear and language processing system in the brain, where audio signals are picked up and translated into an internal language to the human body. Environmental sounds, mistranslation, glitches in the ML model due to training limitations, all contribute to the formation of a machine-centered interpretation of human language and oral communication. The work poses the questions: can machine learning models act as complex archives and artifacts of human behavior? Can machines “learn” human culture? Are they unreliable witnesses?