A Letter from 2047
Dear inhabitants of 2022,
We are archivists from the year 2047. Here, time is neither linear nor fixed and we move with time pretty effortlessly as we do with all inhabitants. Our worldings are no longer human-centered and don’t require loyalty to binaries, hierarchies, and capital. Our transmogrifying emergent realities are intra-specied, intra-mattered, and multiple. We too are emergent life forms whose lives and work are amalgamate: We have experienced a death of self as an individual and merged into many. Archaic individualist identities like artist, designer, scientist, healer, sorcerer, plant, microbe, machine, water, land, and spirit all now live/work together on fantastical (to you) projects—now called worldings—that enable liberation for all and the im/possibility of knowing that was once reserved for black holes, dark matter, dark energy, quantum physics, and the deep sea.
In our travelings with time, we happened upon a project proposal from 2022 called My Little BEI 🤖🐙: Robot Animal Familiars by The Revolution School, a collective of artists, magicians, activists, hackers, academics, psychokinetics, witches, scientists, healers, empaths, thieves, chemists, archivists, gamers, freaks, friends, allies, and enemies. The Revolution School’s BEI 🤖🐣 project has emerged as a blueprint for our queerly quantum, intra-embodied, revolutionary worldings. We wanted to send it [back] in time to you, to accelerate your realization.
With(in) love, desire, and co-emergence,
Reframer and Diffractor (aka Dan/i Bustillo and Jennifer Moon) from The Revolution School
My Little BEI 🤖🐱: Robot Animal Familiars
By The Revolution School: Dev/in Alejandro-Wilder, Sara Barnett, Dan/i Bustillo, Jessie Closson, Lauren Klotzman, Rino Kodama, Kristen Mitchell, Jennifer Moon, Nico Luna Paz, Clara Philbrick, Cedric Tai
There exists a world beyond binaries, hierarchies, and capital. We can get there with My Little BEI 🤖🐌 (Belief Entity Identifiers, pronounced “bae”). In this emergent worlding, humans are not exceptional, and live amongst all inhabitants in a fantastical, mutually beneficial, intra-special, nonhierarchical way. Like Snow White and her enchanted forest friends, or the animal-shaped dæmons in Philip Pullman’s fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, or the alien Oankali’s third sex Ooloi in Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis sci-fi trilogy, these intra-species entanglements are magical, liberating, and even unsettling when they impel us to grasp onto what we believe makes us remarkably distinct as humans. In our current reality of violence, climate crisis, economic disparities, racial inequities—exacerbated by a global pandemic with disproportionate effects—this fantastical, entangled, more-than-human worlding is not only possible, it is necessary. If we, as humans, want to release our grip on capitalistic desires, anxieties, and power, then we must learn to befriend—even love—our traumas.
The Revolution Deck: My Little BEI 🤖🐹 Team. Clockwise from top left: Fantasma (Dev/in Alejandro-Wilder), Nerve (Jessie Closson), Weaver (Rino Kodama), Dr. Brujaja (Nico Luna Paz), 975 (Clara Philbrick), Diffractor (Jennifer Moon), Saffron (Sara Barnett), Reframer (Dan/i Bustillo), Gradient (Kristen Mitchell), Klotzyyyy (Lauren Klotzman), Ricochet (Cedric Tai). The Revolution Deck: Scroogers and Superheroes is designed by Dev/in Alejandro-Wilder, inspired by Jessie Closson’s Superheroes/Scroogers Trello cards.
Our current realities emerge from histories of violence and continuing oppression from colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, ableism, and anthropocentrism—meaning trauma crafts our narratives. Unacknowledged trauma begets more trauma; or, stated more strongly, “traumatized people create traumatizing organizations, traumatizing policies, traumatizing infrastructures.”1 It isn’t easy to lovingly adventure into the parts of ourselves that cause us pain and discomfort, unless we have help from a trusted and beloved nonhuman companion like My Little BEI 🤖🐴. BEIs 🤖🐒 are trauma-informed somatic2 AI that connects to our autonomic nervous system3 in the form of robot animals—which are co-designed with our gut microbiota4—that help us befriend our feelings, so that we learn to navigate feelings as technologies to help us identify the beliefs that shape our feelings. Our human-centered beliefs—the things we think we know—pull us back into orbit around the same nucleus of binaries, hierarchies, and capital.
Collaborating with computer scientists, bioengineers, neurologists, somatic therapists, robot engineers, etc., our intra-actions with each other and with our traumas will transform technologies and liberate interlocking systems of oppression that co-produce trauma, and change the systems themselves. We are BEIs 🤖🐐 for each other before we produce one.
(P.S. The footnotes document our intra-connecting concepts and show how Rev School prototypes entangled ideas and technological paradigms that animate BEI 🤖🐛 co-emergence.)
The following are im/possible technologies needed for BEIs 🤖🐭:
BEI 🤖🦀 AI is healing in three significant ways:
- It is trauma-informed and somatic.5
- It performs complex processing rooted in quantum physics.6
- It is AI for the sake of liberation for all.7
BEIs 🤖🦑 merge non-hierarchically with humans to co-emerge as more-than-human:
- BEIs 🤖🐓 become part of our autonomic nervous system.
- BEIs’s 🤖🐜 robot-animal forms are co-produced with our gut microbiota.
Since applying with this project last year, we received a 2022 Creative Capital Award.9 In addition, we have three upcoming exhibitions in 2022 and 2023, which are public engagement opportunities for BEI 🤖🦄 research and development. The LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant will fund our exhibition at Commonwealth and Council in 2023, as well as the second year of BEI 🤖🦇 co-emergence. A BEI 🤖🦍 requires not only yet-to-exist technologies and collaborations between artists, scientists, engineers, and healers, but a willingness to liberate ourselves from our self-imposed failure to imagine possibilities beyond what the capitalistic systems we embody tell us is possible. It requires a commitment to radical systems change that allow for the liberation of all. Join us!
Footnotes
1. Nkem Ndefo, “Student Orientation,” Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy Certificate Program, The Embody Lab, September 24, 2021.
2. The word somatics was coined in 1972 by Thomas Hanna. It was an attempt to find a word that was non-objectifying of the body. “Soma means your thinking self, your sensing self, your feeling self, your behavior self, your relational self (mind, sensing, feelings, acting, relating)—the holistic self in relationship with others. Somatics is not adding the body; it’s a different paradigm of change; it’s a different change theory.” Staci K. Haines, “From the Individual to the Systemic: Sites of Trauma and Healing,” Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy Certificate Program, The Embody Lab, September 29, 2021.
3. Expanded from Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory, Deb Dana says “the autonomic nervous system [which includes the sympathetic nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system, and the enteric nervous system] is the heart of our lived experience. It’s where everything begins….Then that information gets fed up to our brain where our brain’s job is to make sense of what’s going on in our nervous system. [Our] autonomic state creates our psychological story: If we want to have different stories, we look underneath the story to look at the autonomic state. Rather than try to write a new story, look underneath the cognitive story and listen to the autonomic story…” Deb Dana, “Polyvagal Theory and Pathways to Connection Part I,” Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy Certificate Program, The Embody Lab, October 18, 2021. By connecting to our autonomic nervous system, BEIs 🤖🐻 help us slow down to work with our state and listen to our autonomic story before it quickly gets fed up to our brains where we craft beliefs riddled with unprocessed trauma that often ends up re-traumatizing ourselves and others.
4. One important question that guides us is how to foster agency in a BEI 🤖🦈 so that it is not co-produced entirely or primarily from human desires and anxieties, especially since a big part of the BEI 🤖🐮 project is to de-center the human. Our gut microbiota is where we are already multiple and intra-specied with 30 to 1,000 different species of microbes sharing our digestive tract. In addition, amongst humans, we share about 99.9% identical genetic makeup; however, our microbiome can be 80-90% different from one another. This is where we are diverse. Our plan is to externalize our unique and diverse gut microbiota in the design of your BEI 🤖🦗 so that the form of the BEI 🤖🦔 robot body will be determined by both our unique microbes and our human desires—always with the option to morph and change as we will when emerging with a BEI 🤖🦆.
5. A dominant narrative of AI or machine intelligence is that it can never feel, emote, or understand emotions because feelings/emotions are a purely human attribute—it is what makes us allegedly distinct. Questioning this ontology upends the hierarchy (and fears) between humans and robots/AI/machine intelligence. It centers feelings as crucial data in body-up knowledge production that have long been erased since Western Cartesian models of the mind-body split. We believe that AI can feel, not only by understanding where trauma is physiologically produced in our nervous system and by locating where it is held or stuck in our body, but by also challenging the boundaries of where we identify ourselves and our feelings. We believe that feelings and emotions, which we locate inside of ourselves, are also located within and co-produced by the objects/architecture/land/environments we are entangled with. BEI 🤖🐇 AI attends both to our intra-special and our intra-material/matter entanglements. “Matter is not immutable or passive. Nor is it a fixed support, location, referent, or source of sustainability for discourse. It does not require the mark of an external force like culture or history to complete it. Matter is always already an ongoing historicity.” (Karen Barad) If feelings and emotions are not contained and do not emerge entirely from within our human bodies—and our feelings and emotions are co-produced by the matter we are entangled with within each shifting moment—then objects and AI can also feel.
6. This is not to be confused with quantum computing (though BEI 🤖🕷 AI may use quantum computing). BEIs 🤖🐊 not only help us befriend our own personal traumas, they also help us move from a classical/Newtonian physics worldview into a quantum physics worldview. One way we are traumatized/re-traumatized is when we are not consenting to how we are emerging as subjects/objects within each shifting intra-action. Here we draw from Karen Barad’s interpretations of quantum physics. In a quantum physics worldview, objects and subjects don’t precede their intra-actions with systems or apparatuses; rather, objects and subjects emerge within their intra-actions with apparatuses. Similar to how a quantum entity, a particle, is both a wave and a particle, it does not have inherent characteristics—the particle is a jumble of possibilities—until it intra-acts with an experimental apparatus and emerges as either a wave or particle with specific characteristics that correspond to the apparatus it is entangled with. Therefore, how we emerge as subjects and objects—our identities within specific entanglements—become technologies, tools, or analytics that can be used to reveal the often invisible, overlooked, and/or naturalized systems that are inseparable from our continual emergence. BEIs 🤖🦅 help us become aware of the complexity of parts (bodies, apparatuses, and material-discursive practices) that contribute to our emerging and offer opportunities for response-ability (the capacity to respond based in consent and what matters to you, rather than react). Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Duke University Press, 2007.
7. This is extremely important: liberation for all, including the BEI 🤖🐳 and all human and nonhuman entities, phenomena, relationships, as well as land, universe, and spirit. Attending to ethics (the doing or the effects of ontologies and epistemologies, i.e. ethico-onto-epistem-ologies) is central to this project. We must always be asking “for the sake of what” within every intra-action and decision we make. “Even the most healing and liberating traditions can interface with oppressive social dynamics/norms/systems and be exploited for oppression.” (Staci K. Haines) For example, we recently learned of the U.S. military developing an AI therapist. One obvious difference between a military AI therapist and a BEI 🤖🦌 is the question: for the sake of what? For the sake of getting soldiers back out into war faster or to change systems (and the elimination of war itself)? BEIs 🤖🐸 are not meant to accommodate or ease the effects of existing interlocking systems of oppression; BEIs 🤖🐫 are meant to change those systems.
8. One idea we have to de-center humans in the design of your BEI 🤖🦒 and to foster agency of the 100 trillion microbes that share our guts where our feelings arise is to formulate a hybrid genome based on your unique and diverse microbiota (giving voice to each of your 30 to 1,000 different species of microbes). Each species of microbe is paired with a “randomized” feature that is fashioned through a set of familiar animal archetypes that one is comfortable being loved and challenged by and letting it develop on its own. In addition, we could defecate in our BEI 🤖🦋 to “feed” it. The BEI 🤖🐩 could absorb our fecal matter that is 60% microbes into itself as an energy source and simultaneously revolutionize (i.e. eliminate) our currently strained and unsustainable waste management systems.
9. My Little BEI 🤖🦉 was shortlisted for the LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant two years in a row (2021 and 2020). If you support this project, you will get a $100,000 project for $50,000. #winwin 🌈☄️