The translator speaks in chitin tongue

The Translator (Speaking In Chitin Tongues)

The first iteration of new work for the EU Digital Deal program

A new line of research, touching on a series of reflections around interspecies culture, including that of financial and care based partnerships evolving across species such as plants and AI; of non-language based modes of communication; and how stories about care could be remembered and told across species and intelligences, and over time.

ABOVE: FINAL INSTALLATION ZARAGOSSA SPAIN

Pivoting from the short story, by writer Ursula K. Le Guin, The Author of the Acacia Seeds, which playfully imagines a distant future when humans can speak with all animals on the planet, and soon, with plants.
Thinking loosely across a series of considerations around new interspecies relationships. Of recent advances in understanding plant intelligence and vegetal ways of worlding. Of rapid development of AI and robotics, and post-human ways of being.
Considering emerging understandings around plant intelligence and worlding, and the potential for AI to communicate with plants, where humans cannot not.
Of post-human care and its economic edges. Of the form of memory making, telling and loss in digital entities and beings.
Of speculative new interspecies relationships- of a hint of new economic partnership models, and care and of memories.

The series starts with a video based memory.
A small insectoid robot replays (filmically) a memory of the time it was in a contractual partnership with a group of food producing plants. A partnership that ended when the economic circumstances changed.  In it’s dream-like video recollection, the robot re-narrates the issues that lead up to the end of the partnership and the outcome. Arcing through a series of questions- a speculative non-human economic / contractual partnership (between a robot and plants), the economically contingent edges of AI-based care, Dutch commercial greenhouses as the present-future site of complete automation, and thoughts around non-human communication, and whether, if an AI and a plant spoke, they would bother translating for humans.

Of poetry as an act of care based resistance:

I speak with you in chitin sounds/
In tongues of insect wings and diaphragms/
Of buzz and scrape/
of click and vibrate.

As you stand tall and strong/
Listening out for the hertz of beeswing beat/
Of ladybird rub and leafhopper song/
Of cricket chirp and hoverfly hum.

[On language]: The robot ‘speaks’ in insect-like sounds, translated into subtitles in the video. To create the robot’s insectoid speech, a neural network was loaded with the sounds of 50 insects (to which plants have been demonstrated to physically respond- bees, leafcutters, beetles, crickets). The neural network generated a series of emergent sounds in response to the narative text.

[On vegetal responding]: The plants ‘response’ to the robot in its memory is via screen-based generative visuals.

These sometimes-cryptic visuals are based on electrophysiological plant recordings made from the original vegetable plants over time and in response to external stimuli (water/ light/ wind etc). They occur at the metabolic response rate intrinsic to the plants.

Concantenting approach: Creating a library of 50 insects, and machine learning to analyze inputs (text/ voice) and create audio signals by combining fragments from the library