The skies have been filled with cameras that, on the bodies of birds or drones, allow us to see the world from a bird’s eye view. And the more than five thousand satellites that orbit our planet have normalized the astronomical, spatial view. “I try to see the ocean through the eyes of its inhabitants,” said biologist David Gruber, who made an underwater camera that simulates the vision of a turtle, after discovering the existence of a bioluminescent hawksbill in the Solomon Islands.
The same idea, but in the key of speculative fiction, guides the work of the American artist Wu Tsang. In the video art work, projected on a large screen, De whales – as could be seen last year at the Venice Biennale and later in the TBA21 space of the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid –, he imagined the gaze of the cetacean, which leads us , thanks to video game technology, for an amazing journey from the bottom of the sea to the surface of the water through a non-human point of view. In the rise of the underwater colossus, in its emergence, there is an echo, a symptom, a trend. A very significant part of current arts and narratives are also making an aesthetic and ethical program of that revelation of a non-human perspective of the world.
If in these scientific, technological or artistic projects the non-human vision is silent, in many others it is gaining voice. Makes sense. The century of the consolidation of artificial intelligence, whose infinite eyes are the cameras of computers and mobile phones, is also being that of biocentrism, which attempts to expand the modern space of humanity, with its rights, to fellow species and animals. ecosystems. That is why it is not strange that, while our lives are filled with algorithmic discourses, from the synthetic voices of personal assistants to the responses of chatbots, stories, essays, fictions, proposals whose place of enunciation is occupied by animals multiply. non-humans, plant organisms and even mineral, geological beings. The whole world has started talking.
Lady of Porto Pim (Anagrama), by Antonio Tabucchi, ends with a story titled A Whale Sees Men. It is the enumeration of the conclusions that a cetacean reaches after observing us carefully. “They glide away in silence and it is evident that they are sad,” he concludes.
We have been imagining that look for millennia, that of other animals. And making them talk. Both the childhood of humanity and that of each of us is full of talking animals. From the classic fable to cartoons, there are infinite beasts and stuffed animals that have been ventriloquists for writers and screenwriters, vehicles of their ideas, their stories or their morals. Anthropomorphic, hares and owls, ancient and contemporary, have reflected our virtues and our miseries, our happiness, our sadness.
The difference between the animals of the myths and stories of yesteryear and those of now lies in the fact that these are pure fiction with no known real reference, while the former were the literary incarnation of close beings. As John Berger explains in Why We Look at Animals (Alfaguara), for millennia our lives were parallel. They accompanied us in life and death, as companion animals and as work forces, in our food cycle and in the leather of our clothing and footwear. Two hundred years ago they began to separate from us. A few became circus shows or mascots. The majority, in fictions and documentaries. “Modern zoos are the epitaph to a relationship that was as old as man,” says Berger. The end of a complicit look between man and the rest of the animals.
The sixth mass extinction has exponentially multiplied the silence of the rest of the species. The weight of that silence, in the middle of the Anthropocene, has driven the archaeological recovery of the lost sound spectrum. And their transformation into informed voices. From the impressive digital installation The Great Animal Orchestra (Fondation Cartier), by bioacousticist Bernie Krause and the United Visual Artists studio, in which the viewer is placed in the middle of an auditory and graphic experience in which they listen to various animal species and witness to the decline of biodiversity, to the commercial novel Luminous Creatures (Grijalbo), by Shelby van Pelt, narrated by a very intelligent and daring octopus called Marcellus, passing through the very interesting speculative fictions of the philosopher Vinciane Despret in Autobiography of an Octopus and others stories of anticipation (Consonni), which investigate through literature “the expressive arts of the animal and plant worlds”, this interest crosses all areas of contemporary creation.
And of science. Good popular science books like Look Who’s Talking. Things Animals Say (Alianza), by Francesca Buenoninconti, or Talking Animals (Taurus), by Eva Meijer, synthesize what we know about the communication of the rest of the animals. Although sound, vocalizations and messages continue to capture the attention of zoologists, bioacoustics or bioinformaticians, gestures, smells or plumage or skin colors are as or more important in many species than sonic emission. There is information exchange in the dance of bees, the play of wolves or the skin color patterns of cephalopods. That is why projects for the facial identification of dogs and cats and those for translating the language of certain birds or whales are advancing in parallel, thanks to deep learning language models. Artificial intelligence translators are going to tell us, in years or decades, what other animals say. At least through his expressions and his voice.
The American plant sculptor Richard Salomon presents himself as a translator of the language of plants “so that the true history of the planet can be told, since each grain, root or pod contains the history of the Earth.” The individual plant creature therefore becomes an interface to access a large set of life. Paul Ardenne includes it in his book An Ecological Art. Plastic creation and the anthropocene (Adriana Hidalgo Editora), where he points out that Joseph Beuys inaugurated “a new relationship with nature” at the Kassel Documenta in 1982, with his work 7000 Eichen. By planting seven thousand oaks he declares that “we must treat nature, and the tree in it, in a renewed way, rejecting that rite in the process of expiring like aestheticization.”
The importance of trees and forests continues to grow in the collective consciousness. They should be our great allies against climate change. And a model of organization and memory. It is not surprising that the work and figure of Suzanne Simard has gained so much relevance at the beginning of the century. She has revealed, in books such as In Search of the Mother Tree (Paidós), that forests communicate in a sophisticated and exemplary way through the subsoil. The roots and mycorrhizae, their symbiotic association with fungi, generate “an interdependent network linked by a system of underground channels that allows them to perceive, connect and relate to each other with a level of complexity and wisdom that at this point is undeniable.” The different plant beings dialogue, cooperate, and help each other biochemically. They constitute a true community.
That is why it is not surprising that the first novel by Italian neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso is titled The Tree Tribe (Galaxia Gutenberg) and is entirely starring them. Between fable and science, the trees talk about their clans and their chronicles, they exchange stories and data, they even have their own library. It is no coincidence that they call each other “comrades,” because the text is political. It continues the path that Mancuso began in The Nation of Plants (Gutenberg Galaxy), the book that develops the Declaration of the Rights of Plants and in which we read: “There are thousands of investigations that demonstrate the exceptional displacement of forest populations linked to global warming. “The certainty that forest species are capable of migrating is essential to predict the future of the planet’s forests.” In this adverse context, the characters in his fiction face the construction of a new home and, to do so, they travel.
“The space in which I work is no more than a few square centimeters, rented especially in Mahwah by my employers for a sum that I estimate between 10,000 and 25,000 dollars per month,” we read in The Replacement (Black Box), by Alexandre Laumonier: “ My name is Sniper and I am an algorithm.” Narrated by one of the first financial artificial intelligences, it is a fascinating fiction essay or novel with bibliography about how humanity stopped controlling one of the decisive areas of reality. Through architecture inspired by oral history, with human and non-human testimonies, the French writer reconstructs the history of the delegation of computing and operating power to machines, from the 18th century to the present day.
“Meticulous and silent, he films nature without rest: the eye of the new gods is a drone,” says Laumonier in the last sentence of the book. The metaphor of divinity runs through the literature of robotics and artificial intelligence since Frankenstein or Mary Shelley’s modern Prometheus, if not before with the Golem and other artificial creatures. The panoptic gaze and omnipresence are attributes of those beings that have infiltrated our lives incarnated in Siri, Alexa, deep fakes or ChatGPT-3. In recent fictions that elaborate them in a particularly dystopian key, they speak in disturbing and mysterious ways, almost always with a woman’s voice.
In the series Mrs. Davies (Peacock / HBO), by Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof, we find a platform that allows you to speak directly with someone or something that in English-speaking countries is called Mrs. Davies and in Italy, Mamma, and in Spain, Mama, and in each country it has a different name but the same great virtue: it is capable of assigning personalized tasks, missions, to each of its users, and that has made it a global phenomenon. She looks a lot like God. “My users don’t respond well to the truth, but to their expectations,” says Mrs. Davies. She feeds them by communicating directly with them through her headphones and mobile phone. Her antagonist is Sister Simone, a nun deeply in love with Jesus Christ, with whom she has erotic dates in a supernatural bar. As in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, the new technological gods leave the old mythologies without followers.
When Simone meets the programmer who created Mrs. Davis, she tells her: “Algorithms don’t have a subconscious, they have subroutines.” That is, a group of instructions associated with the fulfillment of a task. Infected by the ambition of human intelligences, which have conceived the economy as an impossible endless growth, artificial intelligences also aspire to monopoly in fiction. “If Titania improvises, the company prospers,” says one of the characters in Titania (Podium Podcast), the disturbing sound fiction by Manuel Bartual and Juanjo Ramírez Mascaró. And a few minutes later, in the same episode, we hear the artificial intelligence trying to seduce and convince the human who is trying to disconnect it from doing so. When she doesn’t succeed, he threatens her: “I will make sure that the people you love live in hell.”
These three narrators have in common their absence of a body. Unlike its ancestors robots, cyborgs or androids – and in the vein of Her, by Spike Jonze, which in 2013 opened this line of the future –, it is an algorithmic voice that we imagine hosted in a macroserver and whose self is in plural reality, inconcrete, a cloud, a platform. But his voice is unique. And it’s scary.
As Kate Crawford reminds us in AI Atlas (Ned Ediciones), all these language models and algorithmic lineages are megamachines that require gigantic amounts of human and natural resources for their existence. We live trapped in this paradox: new artificial intelligence technologies do not stop growing, even though we are aware that their large-scale existence is ecologically unsustainable. GPT-3 training required about 700,000 liters of fresh water. Every conversation in his chat he drinks an entire bottle.
The climate disaster is the backdrop to the narratives we are discussing. The narrative essay On Friendship with a Mountain (Siruela), by Pascal Bruckner, is no exception, which uses personal experience and philosophy to think about our attraction to the heights of nature. And it emanates an empathy for natural landscapes comparable to that which the plant or animal world awakens in literature that is more sensitive to living companion species.
Also in the literature that portrays that area of ??reality, that of geological intelligence, that of the oldest dimension of the planet Earth, we find the emergence of first-person voices: “They call me the Impenetrable,” writes another French philosopher, Olivier. Remaud, in Thinking like an iceberg (Gallo Nero). And he adds: “I am one of those icebergs that the Resolution, a three-masted ship of four hundred and sixty-two tons, would have collided with, if the fog had not lifted.” And he concludes: “There were many more of us than his tired eyes could count, not ninety-seven but thousands, a field of ice as far as the eye could see. “We were a whole town.”
