Inkubator

object | video | eggs/chicks | 2024

My project is dedicated to themes such as the living and the artificial, the miracle of life, the mechanisms of birth and reproduction, and our interactions with the digital world. The project also addresses the struggle for existence, for a place in this world.

 In today’s context, it is impossible not to notice the rapid pace of artificial intelligence development and its presence in almost every sphere of life. Large corporations like Google, Apple, and Facebook have previously sought to expand physical and digital space to grow their operations. With the advancement of artificial intelligence, their ambitions have only increased. Huge servers continue to expand, consuming physical space, energy, and data, including our own. One of humanity’s main concerns is losing control over artificial intelligence.

I decided to compare server rooms and servers to chicken farms and incubators. The comparison seems not only visually similar but also has an interesting analogy. Chickens, whose population exceeds the human population threefold, are among the most common birds in the world. From an evolutionary perspective, they have effectively adapted to life on Earth while being kept in captivity. It is worth noting that recent studies indicate that chicken bones will be a leading fossil for the Anthropocene. In an incubator, real chicks develop and hatch; however, the incubator merely supports this process, not creating life but helping it to manifest. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, independently shapes the chick from scratch, extracting matter from chaos and gradually creating life from digital “atoms.” However, this is not real life but rather an imitation.

Can we compare the incubator to a surrogate mother and artificial intelligence to Mother Nature? In both cases, the chick would not appear without human intervention. What role do we play? Creators? Fertilizers? Perhaps we also represent something like artificial intelligence? Or could it be that we are the artificial intelligence ourselves?

Exhibition Documentation Szczur Gallery