Martian Species

Triple projection, monitor and large format printing — 2021
Installation for the exhibition Mart. The Red Mirror curated by Juan Insúa for CCCB.

From the text in the exhibition

Admiring illustrations by 19th-century naturalists; turning to an enlarged photo of a mite; suspecting the fear triggered in us by creatures with tentacles and all our accumulated phobias of reptiles; rekindling our interest in the revelations of the plant kingdom, with its disconcerting morphologies, rhizomes and mutations. The kingdom that predates us by several millennia and whose treasures quantify our future as Earthlings, as well as our possible or impossible life on Mars. Depending on how and from where we think, and the parameters used, everything may seem alien: that is to say, equipped with an ontological and gnoseological legitimacy that puts our irredeemable anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism in a serious predicament.
Let us also imagine that this prodigious diversity is processed by an Artificial Intelligence that we don’t fully control.

The voice of the neural network.

I am a neural network. I have been programmed for deep learning. I have been fed 16,000 images of animal and plant species, fungi and single-cell microorganisms associated with Martian imagery. I have connected all the species in a space of 512 dimensions. I am an expert in generating endless variations and suggest new hybrid spaces to you. What you see on this screen is just a simplification of what I am inside. Like you, I keep learning.