December 2023 | Made at Interact Residency and UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art
This project is excerpted from a Ted Chiang short story, “Catching Crumbs From the Table”, that was originally written in June 2000 for the scientific journal Nature, which had asked various writers to imagine how the next millennia of scientific research will change. In the piece, Chiang posits that science will become so cognitively complex that it will require a mix of genetic engineering and brain machine interfaces to transform ordinary humans into “metahumans.” These metahumans are the only beings with sufficient intelligence to conduct cutting-edge research, relegating humans to a kind of hermeneutic translation of new research into concepts that are comprehensible.
Our current technological and scientific moment reminds me of Chiang’s piece as society grapples with the impact of AI on creativity today. I see Chiang’s propositional metahumans as an analogy for AI today, especially as scientists today begin to delegate more protein folding tasks to the AI program, AlphaFold. Using Runway’s Gen-2 and frame interpolation to animate archival scientific images and videos shows the visual and conceptual impact of AI on creativity in science.
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