This is a trailer/excerpt from the original film, screened at the event.
The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: The Understory of the Understory
5th & 6th December 2020
Online at themind.fish
The Understory of the Understory is the fourth instalment in an ongoing series of festivals on consciousness and intelligence across species, part of the Serpentine’s General Ecology project. With The Understory of the Understory, we go to that place which is simultaneously ground, land, soil and Earth, that is to say, the place where diverse species come together, collaborate, communicate and constitute one another but also where complex systems of redistribution of toxicity, logics of extraction and geopolitics meet.
The Coven Intelligence Program (efrén cruz cortés, Margaretha Haughwout, Suzanne Husky)
Which plant would you choose to teach ethics to artificial intelligence? (2019, 27′)
In some Native languages, the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.”
– Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013)
AgTech is harvesting massive amounts of data on plants. How do we complexify what is being collected? How do we create data that challenges the perception of plants as isolated bodies and resources? In this film, herbalists, shamans, ethnobotanists, witches answer the question “Which plant would you choose to teach ethics to AI?”. In their worlds, plants are ancestors, allies, friends, teacher beings. The video mashes AgTech videos of current uses of AI, ranging from labs to industrial ag, to drone plantations, as well as occidental medieval and renaissance art that gives context to current polarisations of human-plant relations. The film is part of a larger set of inquiries and actions by the Coven Intelligence Program whose mission is to cultivate revolutionary alliances between plants, witches and machines.
The Coven Intelligence Program (efrén cruz cortés, Margaretha Haughwout, Suzanne Husky, formerly APRIORI) is a techno-botanical coven whose mission is to track and encourage emerging revolutionary ecologies of work between plants and machines. Our familiars suggest that this alliance has a history reaching back to at least the 1500s. We use our magick to try to understand more deeply the ‘nature’ of intelligence, and how the differences between communication and resource exchange are collapsing. The future of humanity is not at stake, but racist capitalist heteropatriarchy is.
@suzannehusky @mllebuffalo
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