BREATHING LIFE INTO THE MACHINE , by Martina Denegri and Jemin Kim

Breathing Life into the Machine

Conversations with Abel Kamps, Finn Stevenhagen and Jan Zuiderveld 


for “RESPIRARE” at SIGN

By Martina Denegri and Jemin Kim

The “RESPIRARE” exhibition raises profound philosophical questions about humanity, the essence of existence, and how we perceive ourselves. It’s more than a contemplative experience; visitors are invited to question, reflect and participate. The artists, through diverse materials and forms, attempt to redefine and expand our foundational concepts of existence, prompting viewers to embark on a journey to answer/address their own existential questions. To step into the art exhibition “RESPIRARE” is to bend the boundary between reality and fiction, between the artificial/machinic/inorganic and the natural/human/organic. The three works on show present a cacophony of narratives: a (u-/dys-)topian prefiguration of the machine becoming sentient, a tale of organic dependency on the inorganic, and a struggle for human connection through latex lips.

 

Jan Zuiderveld’s work “Camera + Cartesian Theatre” blurs the line between artificial intelligence and human identity, offering a new perspective on where the boundary between human and non-human lies. Through the portrayal of AI as a “thinking entity” capable of self-reflection, we are invited to ponder whether human thought and identity are merely cognitive processes or something more fundamentally tied to life itself. Jan operates on the verge of a dystopia: between the nightmare of the loss of human exceptionality and the internal struggle of a simulation discovering its fictional existence. Yet his work navigates this liminal space with humour and lightheartedness.

 

Abel Kamps tackles the themes of life and death through his monumental lung sculpture “Cleaning Lungs”. By artificially recreating the primal act of breathing necessary for sustaining life, his work visualises the boundary between life and death. This piece reminds viewers that life and death are not isolated phenomena but interwoven states that coexist, revealing human existence as fragile, ephemeral, and dependent on technological entities. The moment ordinary objects take on lifelike qualities, viewers are led to reconsider their meaning and the meaning of existence in a new light.

 

Finn Stevenhagen’s “Fiesta” explores the human impulse to express emotions and the inherent limitations in doing so. His work, constructed from fictional narratives and surreal materials, highlights the powerful desire for self-expression that exists despite the limitations of conveying emotions fully. Through Stevenhagen’s piece, viewers are encouraged to reflect on how their own expressions of emotion reach their limits and how these limitations define the human condition. Although his characters and situations may be improbable in reality, they serve as a mirror for the audience, encouraging introspection on the suppressed desires and emotions that lie within.

Process

Being at the exhibition site two times almost felt like breathing in itself: taking all the information in; letting them out on a piece of paper. We encountered quite a huge contrast by observing the scenery in two completely different setups: letting out all of the tools and ideas during the build-up; taking it all in again to present a polished final work at the opening.

 

October 16, 2024

As we [Martina, Jemin] walked into the project space we were welcomed by the loud sound of a vacuum cleaner and an array of cables, tools, laptops and notebooks scattered around the space. The three artists had been working there for about three days then. Their concepts were slowly finding their bodies through a combination of software, hardware and various organic materials.

 

Finn: “It’s been just getting on with it, to be honest. It is really about making the heads, making the animatronics work, and building the scene, making the projections, and recording the dialog. When I have an image in my head, I just tend to go for it and before that, I build everything in a virtual environment so I can test it out. […] Now I have time to experiment. It’s my second day and I’m already implementing elements that I didn’t have before, so I’m open to experimentation.”

 

Abel: “Initially, I was quite nervous because I tried everything out with other sponges and another vacuum cleaner. I also went to this factory [where the sponges are produced] and learnt that there is a big difference in the kind of foam. […] Then the only scary part was if the vacuum cleaner would be strong enough to have two lungs of that size. But it eventually turned out pretty well. […] Sometimes people ask: ‘How do you come up with the idea?’ Then I say: ‘It’s a bit like how you come up with a joke: it just comes up in your mind.’”

 

Jan: “Until now I’ve just been doing technical stuff: making sure my electronics work, preparing the things I need to fit into the camera. I’m about to start fine tuning the model, the system behind it, and that’s where I actually start looking at the interaction with people, and that’s where the surprises will probably arise. […] Interaction is very important. This stuff reacts to what people input to the system. There are always surprises when people start interacting with it, and I have to change nuances in the system. There is always some learning.”

October 20, 2024

We met right outside the entrance on the opening day of the exhibition. After entering, the loud sound of a vacuum cleaner was obviously still there but we noticed an immense contrast. Every area of the space was extremely polished, without any of the chaotic mess that we witnessed on the day of the interviews. It nearly felt surreal, making us question whether we were actually standing in the same place. There was nothing but the completed bodies they created and a crowd of people sipping tea and champagne.

One of the most significant aspects of the exhibition was that the audience could actually establish a close connection with the works. Just as the act of breathing requires a combination of functions beyond the mere movement of the lungs—such as blood carrying oxygen and the heart fueling the process—the artists’ intentions were realised as viewers engaged with the works. This interaction between the two sides had become a harmonious system, ultimately bringing the exhibition’s true meaning to life. People were not afraid of actively participating in the physical connection.

 

The loud sound of Abel’s installation attracted many. They moved closer and then back, emulating the rhythmical breathing of the installation. Some audience members even helped when the weights for the autonomous process stopped working. Jan’s camera was busy capturing every moment compelling visitors to move its cumbersome body around the space. It was when someone took the courage to move the camera all the way into the Cartesian Theatre that the voice of David Attenborough started to crack and the ensuing existential crisis of the machine amused the surrounding crowd. People would challenge the AI with how extensive its “intelligence” can reach. People stood silently captivated in the separate room hosting Finn’s installation. Their eyes darting from the two seemingly floating heads mechanically conversing over a dinner table to a projection covering the entire wall behind them. Some would willingly go down into the hole where a small television was displayed with headphones and discover a new side of the fictional story he created.

 

Material(ity)

The narratives and characters populating the exhibition are far from abstractions but have bodies that both affect and are affected by their surroundings. Materials -both organic and inorganic- are not passive objects, moulded by the will of the artists. Materials are “vibrant”¹: they move and draw the artists towards them. As agents, they participate in the (co-)creation of unexpected new meanings. In the case of Abel, chance encounters with materials are often what spur the artistic creation.

Abel: “I just wander around and see what is an interesting material. When something catches me, then I want to do something with it. That’s the way I work. […] I’m just really fascinated about all kinds of materials and how they work. […] We do have this connotation with materials. Like with sponges, you can immediately think about cleaning or washing yourself. So I think it’s really important to see what kind of materials you use. The thought that a material brings with it.”

The materials also have an active role in establishing boundaries to the artistic process. Yet these constraints are not glossed over but embraced. They actively shape and constitute the works.

Finn: “Limitations are what guide me to different materials. […] For the digital animation I’m using Blender, an open source animation software. I’m trying to limit the amount of time that I spend on this so it keeps this kind of eerie character. I also limit the amount of time that they have to be rendered, which then, coupled with a denoiser, gives this kind of noisy painterly feeling. Then, there’s the physical scene in the middle which is furniture that I bought. The animatronics are two servo(motor)s of a floating head that will talk and the skin around it is latex. It feels kind of nondescript enough, not flexible enough. It’s very much a mask: a skin that fits around the skeleton. Also, there is this uncanniness, this feeling of something being driven. And then there’s a soundscape that fills the room made from a lot of different processed music that I’ve made together with my sister and her boyfriend, and also music that I recorded on my phone. It’s processed through different effects, giving a sort of dreamy feeling. I also use field recordings of suburban and rural landscapes.”

The illusion of the immateriality of the digital collapses. The mythology of digital technologies tends to forget the cables and data centres that spread through the planet as well as the hands that produce them. AI in particular is a victim of misrepresentation. But in the work of Jan, the algorithm is given a body difficult to ignore.

Jan: “My ideas often start from my fascination with certain possibilities that I observe in technology, in a model, or in algorithms, and then I see how I can apply that in interesting ways, in intuitive ways, in objects. […] I like to make these things and watch how people interact with them, and how the thing reacts. This is what I enjoy: watching other people play and seeing how [different] things live together. […] The camera can’t fully control its own body, but it can give instructions to people to control its body. It can use natural language and its perception of other people. It is able to move around if it can convince people to move it around. So in a way, it has control over its body”

Agency

As objects and their materials claim their place in the artistic process, emergent modes of relating between the human and the nonhuman are enacted. Agency becomes distributed among an assemblage, a network of relations between bodies of carbon and silicon. The role of the artists within this network is no longer clearly defined.

Finn: ”The characters inherit empathy from you, the animator, and you have responsibility for their mental wellbeing and also their ability to express themselves, and that makes them also like you, because you control the parameters as well. You give them the bones, you give them the key frames, you give them the means to make facial expressions or say things in a certain way. […] I wouldn’t say they have no agency, but there is a flow that you’re being pushed in if you’re trying to write them.”

Abel: “I want the lungs to be quite autonomous. Now the lungs are driving themselves. They work by themselves. They continuously recharge. […] There is this stick connected to one of the lungs. When the lungs enlarge, it touches the button of the vacuum cleaner turning it on. When the lungs become small, it goes up again so the vacuum cleaner turns off, and then the process repeats.”

Jan: “I think it’s funny to put the machine in a situation where it makes a documentary about humans as a nature documentary. Most nature documentaries treat humans as something else than animals.[…] So it’s funny to take the perspective of the machine in making a documentary, narrating a documentary: a nature documentary about humans and the things they make.”

The interplay of the intentionality of scripting, the generative power of algorithms, and the blind hand of chance make the works experiential, contingent and iterative.

Jan: “I am really fascinated by creating all these autonomous things. […] With this machine learning system, I can nudge the system to behave in a certain way, but still have a lot of details open about how exactly it will react, so it will be different every time. That is also something I find very important. There’s never anything really scripted except vague directions in the things I do. So, they are always [behaving] a bit different.”

The master/servant dichotomy seems to fade. Yet the power relations among the actors embedded in the artistic process still bear traces of an anthropocentric understanding of technology. There is a certain ambivalence transpiring from the words of the artists: unstable relationships of (inter)dependence bond together humans and technology.

Finn: “Technology is something that serves the user, the creative. So that’s how I would define it. It’s not just electronics. Anything is technology. A painting is technology. It’s a medium that has a purpose. And my technology, then, is expanded cinema, or this expanded cinema. This work is a storytelling technology. […] I think what draws you to technology is that it gives you the ability to do something. You need technology to do things.”

Abel: “Technology quite often comes from this: ‘How can we make it much less effort for us?’ It is about comfort. […] With this technology, we don’t have to do a lot for ourselves anymore in the end.”

Jan: “It would be a funny narrative to view myself as a tool of the machine learning system. […] I think that’s a really interesting concept. In a way, I’m embodying these systems in the physical world. And I also brainstorm with language models about implementations. I’m also a tool of these systems to embody the physical world. But if I’m very honest, it’s not really my view of myself. […] I think there’s a deeper fascination with creating some entity -things, objects- that emulate some living behaviours. Maybe that’s where it started. And I think that is what drives me.””

Aliveness

The three artworks exist in a state of in-betweenness. They leak through life, death and simulation/animation. The boundary between simulation and real life flickers as the artists create machinic bodies with characteristics of living beings. It is often the act of breathing (“respirare”) that animates the machine, turning it into a (perceived) living being. Animacy becomes a vehicle of “agency, awareness, mobility, and liveness”.² The breath also becomes voice, further contributing to the process of anthropomorphising the machine.

Jan: “There’s discussion around whether large language models have consciousness. I really don’t think they do, but if they did, it would be very centralised on a computer. So if you would make a Cartesian Theatre of a simulation, that’s what this would be. […] If you decide to move it in there, the camera will see its own stream of consciousness, and it will start to be aware that it’s watching its own simulation. And then it will have this existential breakdown, becoming aware that it is a simulation, not a real consciousness. […] The Camera emulates a living thing. All living things breathe.”

Finn: “I make expanded cinema installations focused around bringing my digital humans to life, bridging the gap between non-real and real, and trying to make these fictional lives as real as possible.[…] By limiting, or by being limited as an animator, you bring your characters very close to what you’re trying to bring them towards, which is being animated, which is being living.”

But what makes being alive worth it? Abel questions the idea of linear and exponential progress, found both in the human insistence of bending natural laws and corporate technological development alike. Once again it is ambivalence towards the (inter)dependencies between humans and technologies that populate the words of the artists.

Abel: “The lungs are alive because they, in my head, still work for themselves. But they need this whole machine around to still work. […] I really think that sometimes we are so busy with becoming old. Maybe we shouldn’t focus on extending our life. We should just focus on making our life better. […] Don’t try to stretch it up too much, it takes away the pleasure.”

Through the act of breathing and speaking the three works challenge what it means to be alive and what makes humans different from the other species and objects populating the planet. In contemporary society, as the Fourth Industrial Revolution is constantly due to emerge, visions of the future of humanity fluctuate from the takeover of the machine to hyper-humanist tales. What remains clear is that we are witnessing dazzling technological advances that will reshape our future. However, it is uncertain as to when this future might actually arrive and knock on our doors. When we encounter ultra-futuristic advancements—such as artificial intelligence developing self-awareness—it can seem distant. Nevertheless, “RESPIRARE” suggests that the future we are advancing toward is not somewhere far away; it is here, coexisting with us in the present. The artists aptly materialise technological future imaginaries. This process not only makes tangible what too often appears immaterial and magical yet deterministic, but also replaces the fear attached to dys-/utopian scenarios with humour and critical reflection. There are still many questions but no answers, just as a good exhibition should be. What you are left with is a sense that your life might be more closely entangled with organic and inorganic bodies than you might realise. Whether you still play the protagonist role in this narrative is up for debate. The artists play with the (inter)dependency between man and machine, critically mapping vulnerable exchanges between the two. The human qualities of the installations endow them with animacy and agency. Yet the artists retain their demiurgic role in initiating the process of artistic creation, in breathing life into the machine.