Playing the Long Game: Art, Extinction and AI

Talks by K Allado McDowell & Marjolijn Dijkman

Artist, writer and AI pioneer K Allado-McDowell brings together art, ecology and AI. They were one of the driving forces behind Google’s Artists + Machine Intelligence programme in 2015, have co-authored several books with GPT-3, and were an editor of The Atlas of Anomalous AI.

Artist Marjolijn Dijkman similarly transforms her often far-reaching, multidisciplinary research into compelling installations and series of works that move between fact and fiction, revealing hidden stories about power, knowledge and ecological change.

On Thursday evening, 10 September, both artists will come to MU Hybrid Art House for a talk about their practices and the works on view in the exhibition Metabolising Time.

K Allado-McDowell will take a closer look at The Known Lost, a proposal for a large-scale monument commemorating all extinct species—an artwork the artist would one day like to actually realise.

Marjolijn Dijkman’s Between the Lines and Dormant Seeds are on view as a combination of two works that emerged from her years of research in the Red Zone near Verdun. This abandoned, forested landscape has remained inaccessible since the First World War, declared off-limits and transformed into a kind of green sarcophagus. Exactly 100 years later, it was once again threatened—this time by climate change.

In their own distinct ways, both artists explore different experiences of time and the metabolising of the biosphere, intelligence and extinction, challenging us to imagine alternative visions of life.