7 art and tech ideas I discovered at Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies

This year, Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies, the Trondheim Biennale for Art and Technology, is exploring “the physical and technological body caught between virtual ecstasy and digital obesity.” The conferences, performances and exhibitions examines whether the digital lives up to its promises of freeing us from our bodies and other physical constraints. The question is as old as the digital itself but the Meta.Morf programme looked at it from multiple, unexpected and bold perspectives: what happens when bodies are suspended between life and death both online and in nature? How do organs perform when they live outside out of bodies? What is thermofuturism? Are plants interested in playing with an AI system? What happens when a face recognition system parodies our anthropocentric world views?

There are so many stories to tell from the festival, I’ve selected 7 of them:

Paula Strunden, Rhetorical Bodies, MU Artspace Eindhoven, Performance by Tu Hoang, Photo by Hanneke Wetzer, 2023

Rebecca Allen embraces the model of former Kraftwerk drummer Wolfgang Flur. Photo: Linda Law, courtesy Rebecca Allen

Many of the “godfathers” of the VR industry were in fact women

In her opening keynote of the Meta.Morf conference, Paula Strunden reframed the history of VR and highlighted the significant contributions of women who pioneered the early days of the VR industry but tend to remain in the shadow of the “grandfathers”, “fathers” and “godfather” of VR. Rebecca Allen, for example, created the visual material for Kraftwerk 1986 music video Musique Non Stop. There are more examples of female pioneers in A Line Traced, Female Pioneers in the History of VR, hosted by Strunden.

She also introduced the XR Atlas, a repository of under-the-radar examples from literature, film, theatre and multimedia arts that explore spatial perception at the crossroads of the material and virtual worlds. The objective of the platform is to challenge the conventional view of XR as mere escapism and instead explore the possibilities of a more embodied and enacted understanding of virtual technologies. Practitioners and researchers from all disciplines who are invited to contribute to the discussion.

Boris Eldagsen, TRAUMA PORN, 2023 – Ongoing

Boris Eldagsen, The Electrician. From the series PSEUDOMNESIA

Photoprompting is an art (but you knew that already)

Boris Eldagsen talked about what it takes to be a good promptographer. Promptography is the art of devising very specific and calculated text prompts into generative AI programs like DALL-E or Midjourney and then adjust their outputs to obtain captivating photographs. With AI, you don’t create out of nothing, you recycle. As a result, the technology reveals the collective unconscious buried within collective data. An average promptographer doesn’t go beyond the clichés. A good promptographer adds purpose, imagination and a vision.

Eldagsen is famous for winning the prestigious Sony World Photography Award with an AI-generated image titled ‘Pseudomnesia: The Electrician’ in 2023. It became the first ever AI-generated image to win a photography contest. When the prize committee told him that he had won, the artist admitted that the photo had been made with DALL-E, and that the time had come to discuss the problems involved with using AI in art: the multiplication of the platforms and features but also the disinformation potentials. Are photo competitions prepared for AI-generated images?

In November that year, the prestigious photojournalism contest modified its rules to prohibit the use of AI in all its categories. Eldagsen is still trying to discuss with politicians, the media and other professionals about the most problematic sides of AI.

The artist’s series TRAUMA PORN uses vintage photography from Nazi Germany and World War II to explore trauma as a long-term consequence of war. To balance out his bias, Eldagsen teamed up with Bangladesh artist Tanvir Taolad, to bring out the timeless aspects of the image material. He also invited Spanish photographer Carlos Collado to assistant in the creation of AI-generated images.

Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies Conference at Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst. Photo: Juliane Schütz

In 1886, men were already dreaming of pliable, physically flawless female androids

I’ll be forever grateful to Daniel Rourke for bringing attention to The Future Eve, a symbolist science fiction novel published in 1886 by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. The book, known for popularising the term “Android”, tells how a fictionalised Thomas Edison builds a machine-woman for a friend who is appalled by the superficiality of women. The Android, named Hadaly, is a perfect woman who could bring a man true happiness. It/she has none of the flaws and artificiality of real women.

The rabid misogyny of the story is shocking. Yet, today’s idealised forms of beauty and companionship have not radically evolved. There are echoes of Hadaly in the movie Her and AI still thrives on stereotypes. Generative AI like Midjourney, for example, depict queer people as white people with lilac hair, and lesbian women with tattoos and heads shaved on the side.

Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies Conference at Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst. Photo: Juliane Schütz

The history of Neural magazine deserves a book

In his talk, Alessandro Ludovico highlighted some of the most ingenious ideas he and his team came up with while editing Neural, a “magazine of evolving ideas.” I’ll just mention one:

The first issue of Neural (November 1993) featured William Gibson’s short novel Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) in its first ever Italian translation. The printed version of the novel was published on photographic paper, so that the more you read it the more the letters faded. The original electronic version of the book was distributed on floppy disk. It contained a software that would delete the book content after a single use, so that the very moment you flipped the electronic page, that page would be physically erased from the disk. At the end of the lecture, the content was completely gone. At that time, Neural was in contact with US hackers who had videotaped the text, transcribed and made available for free.

Queer Death Studies are are an emerging field of research that rethinks the life-death binary

Marietta Radomska, the founding director of research platform The Eco- and Bioart Lab and co-founder of the Queer Death Studies Network, used 3 artworks (Tanja Vujinovic’s Carboflora; C-Lab’s The Living Dead: On the Trail of a Female and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s The Substitute) that venture into the living/non-living interface by bringing back to ‘life’ – even if for a brief moment – species that have been marked as ‘extinct.’

Now, Queer Death Studies are a transdisciplinary field of research that investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions and expectations surrounding the issues of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world while paying attention to the ways planetary-scale necropolitics render some lives and deaths more recognised, understood or grievable than others.

In 2025, Marietta Radomska will publish “Routledge Handbook of Queer Death Studies” together with with Tara Mehrabi and Nina Lykke.

Neanderthal will haunt us forever

Frode Oldereid and Thomas Kvam, Requiem for an Exit, 2024. Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies at Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst. Photo: Juliane Schütz

Frode Oldereid and Thomas Kvam, Requiem for an Exit, 2024

One of the most popular installation of the exhibition at Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst is a massive robot with a human face and artificial brain and body towers above visitors. He, she or it quietly delivers a monologue about the inherent evil embedded within the human genome.

According to the animatronic, the genetic makeup of contemporary human populations is haunted by remnants of Neanderthal DNA that disappeared not long after when our ancestors migrated northwards and spread across much of the world. They were homo sapiens’ closest relatives. Some researchers claim that Homo sapiens infected them with pathogens. Others that it was just bad luck. Or maybe we assimilated them by having sex with them. Many argue that we outcompeted them. What is sure is that modern humans with European, Asian or Native American ancestry inherited about 2% of their genes from Neanderthals.

Frode Oldereid and Thomas Kvam’s robot asserts that we (the homo sapiens) did kill off Neanderthals. As a result, our crime not only constitutes the first instance of genocide committed by humans, it is also haunting us.

All the horrors we committed throughout history, from the conquests of Genghis Khan to the Holocaust, will reverberate in the future, whether that future is on Earth or whether it takes place on distant planets. The robot urges us to consider the impact that this complicated genetic heritage will have on our ethical and existential journey forward.

Cadie Desbiens-Desmeules, I’m not a Robot, 2021. Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies at Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst. Photo: Juliane Schütz

Sometimes, it’s really difficult to distinguish a cat from a car

I’m not a robot, a series of artworks by Cadie Desbiens-Desmeules, explores the unpalatable world of digital labour and human intelligence tasks.

Machine learning requires millions of hours of soul-sucking, repetitive, poorly paid human labour. Without the hidden microtasks performed by human workers, tech companies would never be able to reap those massive profits. What is vexing is that we have all been part of this system of exploitation. And we weren’t even paid. By solving those ultra annoying Captcha puzzles, each of us have been training AI systems for free.

Desbiens-Desmeules fed thousands of images of cats to an AI model specialised in identifying cars. This experiment results in absurd-looking creatures that are neither cat nor car, yet somehow both at once. The artist then created a simulation of the Captcha challenge that asks users to identify either cats or cars, over and over. The process is far more addictive than traditional Captcha, especially if you do it with someone else because you quickly realise how easy it is to disagree over the ratio of catness vs carness of an image. The more you click and click, the more you miseducate the algorithm.

More images from the festival:

Tim Høibjerg, Ejector. Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies at TEKS.studio. Photo: Juliane Schütz

Marie-Luce Nadal, Madeleine Crossbow. Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies at Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst. Photo: Juliane Schütz

Marie-Luce Nadal, Vie d’ailleurs. Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies at Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst. Photo: Juliane Schütz

Marlot Meyer, Hotspot. Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies at Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst. Photo: Juliane Schütz

Werner van der Zwan and Charl Linssen, Unconventional Self. Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies at Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst. Photo: Juliane Schütz

Cadie Desbiens-Desmeules, I’m not a Robot, 2021. Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies at Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst. Photo: Juliane Schütz

Martinus Suijkerbuijk and Øystein Fjeldbo, Turing Gaia: Entering Thermodome, 2024. Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies at Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst. Photo: Juliane Schütz

In ‘Entering Thermodome’, a non-playable character explores autonomously a virtual environment experiencing the most unpleasant effects of climate change. The behaviour of the character is determined by how its virtual sensors respond to varying environmental heat levels. Does the virtual representation of climate change makes its most extreme realities more acceptable? Or more tangible?

If you’ve missed the exhibition, performances and conference in Trondheim, you have an opportunity to catch up with the festival in September at V2_ in Rotterdam: [up]Loaded Bodies at V2_ in Rotterdam, NL. The dates of the exhibition & conference are 19 September – 13 October. The programme was curated by Espen Gangvik and Zane Cerpina of Meta.Morf and Boris Debackere and Florian Weigl from V2_.

Previously: PL’AI. An AI robot created to play with cucumber plants, Marie-Luce Nadal. Machines to capture clouds and lightning strikes, Pareidolia. AI finds faces on grains of sand; Meta.Morf 2022: What does it mean to love nature when many of us doubt that it still exists?, Tiny Mining. Extracting minerals from our own body, Embracing ticks and other disgusting creatures.

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