TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself)

4IR–the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Today, after more than three decades of digital revolution, we live in the era of surveillance capitalism, the monopolistic extraction of human surplus data from the networks and its aggregation, analysis, and weaponisation as behavioural advertising to modify human thoughts and behaviours. This all-or-nothing contest to manipulate the world for profit is unsustainable. As an elite super-class of tech billionaires emerges the middle class erodes and social and economic inequality increases.

The emergent Fourth Industrial Revolution, colloquially referred to as 4IR or Industry 4.0, fundamentally differs from previous technological revolutions. This fusion of artificial intelligence (AI), smart systems, robotics, machine-to-machine communication, the Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, biotechnology, and quantum computing will empower engineers, scientists, and private enterprise to accumulate radically disproportionate degrees of power and wealth, outside of democratic processes and regulatory frameworks. As the biotech and infotech revolutions merge, information will flow from the body and brain to 'smart' machines via biometric sensors, allowing corporations and government agencies to make decisions on citizens’ behalf and modify behaviour in new ways. According to Yuval Noah Harari (2019), Big Data algorithms will monitor and ‘understand’ human behaviours and feelings much better than humans can. In this case, ‘humans and machines might merge so completely that humans will not be able to survive if they are disconnected from the network’. If so, the illusion of human ‘free will’ will likely disintegrate as authority shifts from humans to computers used by institutions, corporations, and government agencies to understand and manipulate us. Harari speculates that beyond manipulation, once these human and non-human entities have enough data, they will have the power to make choices for us or ‘hack the deeper secrets of life to re-engineer organic life and to create inorganic life forms’. Moreover, this form of ‘technological disruption is not even a leading item on the political agenda’, and engineers and scientists are constructing the emergent ‘twin revolution’ of biotech and infotech that could soon restructure ‘our very bodies and minds’.

The Lunchbox talks surrounding AI and a technologically determined future at the T&G

Listen to what Lizzie O’Shea has to say in the discussion about human Rights and new Technology.

TWIFSY: Experimenta used relational aesthetics through soundscapes, generative AI, and a physical art installation to critique technological determinism and its impact on society. The project concerns issues relating to the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the ethical and social issues surrounding the monopolisation of AI by Big Tech and its impacts on digital human rights. Citizens were invited to participate in a series of Lunchbox talks at the T&G Building at 161 Collins Street from August 27th to 29th, 2024—questions of identity, autonomy, and human agency at the convergence of reality and virtuality. The talks, hosted by Experimenta and the T&G, were facilitated by Nathan Scolaro and the artist Peter Thiedeke. Our guest speakers were Lizzie O’Shea, founder and chair of not-for-profit agency Digital Rights Watch, Kaj Lofgren, CEO of Regen Melbourne, and Troy Innocent, Director of the Future Play Lab, RMIT.

This is what Lizzie O’Shea has to say in the discussion about human Rights and new Technology.

Futural Generative AI narratives used to kickstart the Lunchbox talks

AIs were prompted with variable questions and asked to consider the current geopolitical environments and technocracies–how political power is linked to geographic space and how government decision-makers and business leaders are selected based on their expertise in a given area of responsibility–particularly their scientific or technical knowledge, rather than philosophical position. These are some of the hundreds of input questions and AI outputs made with multiple generative tools.

If society delegates human creation and decision-making to AI, will we have agency to choose our future, or will we continue to forfeit human rights and free will to Big Tech?

Prologue: Post Fourth Industrial Revolution–4IR–According to AI

AIs generated the imagery and sound in this work when prompted to speculate on a technologically determined world driven by Big Tech–a world enveloped by a planetary-scale computation driven by Artificial Intelligence–after the collapse of the biosphere. The sentiments of the sound and lyrics generated by the AIs are youthful and hopeful–if somewhat naïve. The language of the imagery reflects the visual patterns created by humans over thousands of years of art history, conflating the real and the virtual, the human with the non-human, the factual and the fictitious, and it speaks to a utopian-dystopian future.

Considering the status quo, how might AI conceptualise the future?

Episode 01: The Rise and Fall

The generative AI in this montage has a roughness of quality, highlighting the limitations of these early training models. The painterly imagery has many errors, glitches, and faults, including deformed human and animal forms, and the generative voice-over inflects in strange ways. Ironically, as generative AI improves, the charming nuance of these artifacts, by-products, and detritus will gradually disappear. The intrinsically dysfunctional nature of works from this period of AI evolution will be far more challenging to create, and this work will be considered a retro example of generative AI in a very short time–if not already.

If Big Tech is left unchecked, will capitalism break and degrade society radically?

The immersive multi-channel soundscape

Two AI soundscapes that mimetically presuppose the future were installed inside the T&G atrium for two months. The first subliminal (1:10:38) looping AI message emanated beneath the artwork. The second (1:17:07) loop was distributed through the building’s multi-channel sound system at a very low level so that the messages are barely audible. However they repeated each hour from 7:00 am to 9:00 pm. The two layers are very similar, however not synchronised, and form a single aural entity to create a spatial depth that mimics and supposes the sonic environment of the ‘future city’.

The altar-like floor installation in the atrium of the iconic T&G building, beneath Google’s offices at 161 Collins St., Melbourne.

In each instance, TWIFSY ‘s physical installations use circular economics and manifest as new post-digital image objects. Made from the detritus and byproducts of previous installations, TWIFSY: Experminta consists of twenty-four panels assembled over two months made from more than 104,000 components–recycled e-wasted computers, acrylic, resin, steel, glass, LEDs, speakers, ethernet, DMX512-A and Art-net software protocols. The materials used in TWIFSY: Experminta were up-cycled from the remnants of TWIFSY@ISEA, a site-specific installation exhibited in the Brisbane Queen Street Mall from 20 June to 14 July 2024.

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