This piece was first published on Mozaik Ezine, December, 2023

In 2023, this essay was accepted as a winning entry for MOZAIK Philanthropy’s Future Art Writers Award - a grant system for emerging and established art writers. ‘The Machine In The Mirror: When technology asks us to consider our reflection for the better’ is a review of The Digital Awakening, a virtual exhibition that explores and interrogates our meta-future

Screenshot of The Digital Awakening virtual exhibition.

As human beings begin to shift away from the physical world in favor of virtual and augmented realities, the world of art stands at the center of a global movement where immersive worlds, online avatars, and the advent of a digital blockchain-based-future will inevitably have a profound impact on art, culture, politics, activism and the economy. The Digital Awakening includes the work of 25 U.S. artists in a virtual exhibition

Still of Servant, Child, Lover. (LOVER) Alex Trochut - full animation here

“This is a radical jump from the doomerism that persistently infiltrates public opinion about the rise of AI, where fear-based thinking sees machine intelligence as an extinction risk. And it offers hope.
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— Anna Seaman

By Anna Seaman

Perhaps it is a question of youth; perhaps it is a question of responsibility? Why is the uncontrollable growth of machine intelligence called singularity when there is nothing singular about our multiplicitous multiverse? I think the children understand.

X-Reality: A Manifesto for Mixed Reality Futures, by Atom Futures and InferStudio sets out a framework to protect the vulnerable, eliminate discrimination, save the environment and more. With measured reasoning, the manifesto owns the task of building a better world alongside rather than against technology. This collective artwork combines images with speculative thought experiments and written principles to guide the development of positive XR futures. The artists/authors recognise that machine intelligence offers humanity a chance to reflect upon our existence; to know ourselves better and to change mistakes of the past.

This is a radical jump from the doomerism that persistently infiltrates public opinion about the rise of AI, where fear-based thinking sees machine intelligence as an extinction risk. And it offers hope. As I ponder this manifesto, I question what would happen if technology allows us the chance to truly witness ourselves. By outsourcing memory to machines that do not rely on the flaws of humanity’s forgetfulness, we can create an everlasting collective memory. And how would that help us?

X-Reality: A Manifesto for Mixed Reality Futures by Inferstudio and Atom Futures

Humans love to forget. Either that or distort reality once it has passed into the corridors of recollection. In fact, it is a survival instinct. Sometimes the past is too awful to recall. But human identity is bound up with memory. British philosopher John Locke’s memory theory stated that a person's identity only reaches as far as their memory extends. As memories fade, we no longer know who we are. So, just as it can be helpful to forget, it is even more essential to remember. Hannah Arendt, a German philosopher developed a political theory around collective memory stating that if we make the effort to remember together, we can learn. Memory, she stated, can be a “positive” resource for “political innovation in the aftermath of historical ruptures''.

Therefore, without looking at the past, how can we construct our future? Echoes of this are embedded within the X-Reality manifesto that calls for a “collective digital awakening”, saying that there must be guiding principles to build XR futures, ensuring that they are equal, safe, inclusive, sustainable, open and transparent. It is a utopic dream but where else other than through the visions of artists can we imagine something beyond the boundaries – perceived or otherwise – of daily grit, socio-economic strata, prejudice, and disparity?

Dev Harlan

5 Body Problems #2 - Lost And Found In The Wash, 2022

But what will become of the past if we hurtle towards a digital future?

Andrea Castillo’s presentation Metaverse Archaeology is an aesthetic and historic approximation to an ancient culture buried in the metaverse’, based on the creative and imaginative ideas of ancient human civilizations, especially the first habitants of South and Central America, 14,000 years ago.

Her fictional archaeological pieces, which she imagines are the result of an expedition to a utopian ancient civilization that inhabited earth and space, are made of pieces of ceramics, art, and technology rendered using computer systems called neural networks modeled upon the brain and nervous system.

Metaverse Archaeology NFT Collection by Andrea Castillo

She used Google Collab workflows to access shared research and then applied Artificial Neural Networks to generate images by materializing concepts from abstract words and ideas. Her purpose: to exhibit these fictitious artifacts “as a key to opening the conversation about how the artisans and creatives from the past are still influencing us today.”

Here, I am reminded of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which suggests the future already exists and those three ways we separate time — past, present, and future — are nothing more than illusions created by our minds. So, as the artists in The Digital Awakening question history, the present moment and multiple possible futures, the exhibition as a whole interrogates the shift from physical existence to virtual existence and what an extended reality in a digital realm looks like.

Kevin Cobb’s Ecstasis (2022) sits at the intersection of today and tomorrow. A 3D avatar-sphere of the artist’s perception of himself captures the “surreal qualities of being a subject on the internet”. The avatar’s perspective is seen through a fisheye lens from just beyond the scope of his eyelids. It is “a virtual world where one’s perspective is not just a subjective tool for understanding space, but an objective fact”.

Today, we continually engage with a digital environment that regularly reminds us that it is fully aware of and responsive to us – think vacation deals appearing on your feed after you search for your next travel destination.

Against this backdrop, Cobb unpicks the role of the algorithm. “Not only are you being better understood by others, but you’re also potentially gaining a better understanding of yourself, in ways that people have never had the ability to do before,” he says. With AI, as we equip technology with knowledge about not only our browsing habits but also with memories and learned experiences, there is potential for new perspectives. “Since such a robot may be able to think and feel several times faster than any human, and have immediate access to all digital knowledge on earth, and since a robot’s emotions may not necessarily be informed by anything like the bodily needs that often inform our emotions, its emotions and thoughts, subjectively, would be wildly different in kind than ours.”

If the algorithmically powered internet is a mirror and reflects back at you what you put in, then maybe the emerging virtual XR world allows what is beyond the surface to emerge.

What if we can curate a future where our digital selves are better versions of our physical selves and that, by empowering machines, we remember what it is to exist in a conscious universe where we are all connected by a greater force?

**John Jahni Moore.** Destiny’s World: Beyond The MotherBoard, 2022

John Jahni Moore strikingly addresses the possibilities of being able to transcend physical identity. His acrylic and red clay painting Destiny’s World: Beyond The Motherboard is inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting, Christina’s World, which depicts a young woman who is unable to walk, lying in a field struggling to reach her house in the distance. In Moore’s work, the protagonist (inspired by his daughter Destini) is in the foreground and the building out of reach to her is New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Moore is a southern-based artist, which he says restricts his access to the traditional art world – a subject which he is “dancing” with in this work. However, his character, whose complexion is engraved with what look like wires on a circuit-board, is empowered. “The digital age is constructing a new landscape, a more accessible framework. It opens up alternative connections of agency,” says Moore.

However, in an ever more digitally linked world where traditional boundaries crumble, prejudice can be subverted through avatars, and robots help us to ameliorate our shortcomings, there is something at risk: physical sensation. While the digital age connects us in a myriad of contexts, will we become isolated by it? Alex Trochut’s digital triptych of rotating sculptures that read as both ‘human’ and ‘robot’, depending on the angle of viewing, are titled: Servant, Child, and Lover. The titles represent three archetypal human relationships and the paradoxical insecurity inherent within them. Inspired by Donna J. Haraway’s 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto that explores the fusion of man and machine as a concept, Trochut’s work delves into how “our techno-lives are a complex entanglement of matter, flesh and bone, meat and metal, but also sensation – of isolation and ever presence.” Are we human or robot or destined to teeter somewhere in between?

In the virtual world, the relationship with senses as we know them is recast. Something that people with synesthesia already experience. Shaun Hu’s Synesthesia Machine envisions an intelligent apparatus with the ability to create and emit scents based on facial expressions.

Despite its rather clunky appearance and basic aesthetic, conceptually this piece touches the heart of the AI debate, the ability of a machine to access human emotions. Hu says that by enabling his contraption to recognise expression, he can build a synesthetic connection between what we feel and how each feeling smells.

The merging of senses and their changing roles permeates JU-EH’s contribution to the exhibition. A classically trained male soprano from China, JU-EH embodies his practice in an aural soundscape. His artist pseudonym represents a phonetic spelling of the first part of his name that also translates to the word ‘awareness’. And it is awareness that he investigates.

Hint 仚 is an example of his spatial-sonic performance art, where the visual component is an AI produced avatar and the audio tracks are operatic versions of the five vowel sounds.

Here, JU-EH reaches his audiences through their minds. “The voice is an instrument that depends on imagination,” he says. “We cannot touch, smell or see the voice so to sing and to hear a song, you have to use your mind.” The digital realm allows JU-EH to stand as a singer on an imagined stage where judgements based on physical appearance shed away. A necessary component, he says, to allow his sounds to touch others’ souls.

I ponder upon this: in every virtual experience is it only in the mind that we meet. And here, the aural and visual sensations are the most visceral. All the more haunting, then, are the goosebumps that appear as JU-EH attempts to touch the inner being with vocal frequencies. It becomes an almost tangible encounter between artist, art and viewer. As this encounter fragments, I am left with an echoing inquiry, what will it take to harness all the layers of our newly awakening digital realm into multiple forces for good?

The Machine in the Mirror