“OPERATION” by @benirito at ORGANIC INTELLIGENCE at @slip_belltown
I made a friend on Monday. We’d first met at an art show, so it seemed fitting that we’d meet up again at another. But first, we pretended to be elsewhere for a while, somewhere far from this city we’ve both adopted. We sat at a sidewalk cafe, performing aperitivo under a Seattle sun turned a Mediterranean orange by the smoke of Spokane’s hellfires, and we talked about what it meant to think and feel and relate in this part of the world. Our backgrounds were vastly different, and yet, the resonances were strong enough that I sometimes caught the quips and facial expressions of friends I haven’t seen in years.
We talked about culture clashes and the way TikTok can flatten concepts, then made our way to Slip where Beni’s piece beckoned us from across the street. It’s a piece about gendered expectation and performance, but it’s also a game. I didn’t see anyone dare to interact with it as designed, but this was Beni’s taunt: an act of performative vulnerability and power transference. I did not touch the artwork, but I did play doctor with my camera.
Performativity. That’s one of those words that TikTok has done a number on. These days it’s thrown around like it’s a synonym for “fake,” when the word has more syllables for a reason. All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; that’s not just a line in a play. That’s an ontological statement. Before we make a single choice about the kind of person we want to be, we are constrained by scripts that tell us who we are and are permitted to become.
Nothing is ever a blank slate. No one is ever merely encountered: we are all filtered, parsed, and pattern matched. In our presentation of the self, we are always already algorithmic: what counts as an acceptable performance, what mistakes will spoil it, how will audiences judge success, how do we coordinate to maintain the “game.” This can feel like there’s no way out; even “exit stage left” is a stage direction.
And yet, every play can meet its heckler, though the role has to be crafted too. Not as a bolt from the blue, but as an alternative performance; a performance of alterity. x
“Organic intelligence” is a performative category; it emerges in contradistinction to big tech’s own ‘annunciation’ of new life in the world—the category of “artificial intelligence.” The two are conjoined twins; neither makes sense without the other. So what is organic intelligence announcing?
The week-long exhibit at slip_belltown, curated by @elleglasseart and @sophiamholland, claims “the tactile, the visceral, the somatic” as priorities, a sense of organicity as felt in and with the body clearly seen in the visual cohesiveness of the works on display: textures, curves, reflective surfaces, materials that have been pierced, pulled, and stretched. There’s an air of fragility and tenderness to the whole, as well as a sense of strength in numbers. And that’s what I think ORGANIC INTELLIGENCE is announcing most loudly.
As part of the opening night, there was a panel discussion on living with and fighting back against AI, and the two themes that emerged among the speakers were community and organizing. The closing event will feature small vendors selling their wares. In this way, the event felt less like a typical exhibit and more like squatting Seattle’s arts and culture calendar, as if to say: this space is now an autonomous zone, if only for a week. That too is “organic intelligence.”
But there’s a third sense that I only just started thinking about: as one of the panelists put it, we are already “in the middle” of the story of AI, and we do not have the luxury of pretending to know when or how it will end. Organic intelligence, then, must wrestle with its twin whether it wants to or not. It’s like what happened with the x-ray: we cannot see a body quite the same way again.
In this light, a call for participation becomes a generative prompt; an artist statement becomes a source code; texture becomes the selective deployment of one industrial complex over another; art becomes one politic among others. That’s what I see in the middle of AI. We will understand that we have always been “artificial.” We will realize that “the human” was always unevenly distributed. And we will choose the kinds of centaurs we want to bring into the world. x
“OPERATION” by @benirito at ORGANIC INTELLIGENCE at @slip_belltown //
I think the hard-limit many of us face when we crave and strive for better worlds is the pain of realizing that we don’t have all the building blocks we need. That community is hard, actually. That organizing can break our hearts. That we don’t know what we don’t know until it slaps us across the face, and then it’s too late to realize just how much has already been stripped away from us since before we were born.
The biggest arguments against automation sometimes miss one of the worst: the loss of skill and capacity. It started with mechanization and continues today, in the robot’s creep into how we think and feel and treat each other. Conviviality, introspection, the ability to listen and learn; these are skills just as vulnerable to atrophy as any manual craft. And while no one hates a forklift (as Cory Doctorow quips in his book), everyone loses when emotional labor is treated like a heavy burden.
AI didn’t start the fire; AI is an accelerant, and it will only make capitalist culture’s worst tendencies even more devastating: speed over thoughtfulness, efficiency over relationship, prediction over curiosity, optimization over care. And we can resist — in how we show up for each other; how we mean what we say; how we listen before we jump to conclusions; how we extend a hand of support, stick our necks out, and make it safe for others to do the same.
These things don’t just happen. They are organic technologies. We are not simply born with them ready-to-hand. They must be fashioned and artificed. They must be performed. And while this is true for all of us, it’s especially so in a city like Seattle: this city that’s been at the epicenter of all these technologies of atomization.
This will require more than just our resistance; this will require our unlearning and relearning how to be human. And that’s what so many of us who moved here from elsewhere find ourselves bonding over while struggling to put it into words. x