Agentic Anxiety

 

Rapid developments in AI are challenging our notions of intelligence, consciousness and hierarchy, producing binary modes of apocalyptic anxiety and blind optimism in the process. Phantom Channels proposes that we need to rethink the human hegemony over everything it sees - nature, technology, the universe - to adopt a distributed and resonant approach to the diverse agencies we are entangled with every day. It is in the soundscape that this sensorial shift flattens our understanding of the irrational, scientific, artificial and ephemeral; all phenomena becoming oscillatory, potentially transgressive and thus inherently challenging to fixed and static positions. The exhibition submits that, only when open dialogues with other forms and ideas of consciousness have become manifest, will we be able to fully address complex ecological, philosophical, and technological global concerns that are intensifying and calcifying through the increased polarisation of the ideological stances that shape them.

 

Throughout the course of Western history, a range of political, cultural, legal, belief and social frameworks have been formatted to drive human and non-human intelligences to and beyond the boundaries of logic. The list of supposedly aberrant phenomena includes cryptids, cosmic forces, animals, demons, ghosts, UAPs, psychic entities, psychedelic experiences and more recently, artificially intelligent agents and deepfakes. The purpose of driving such forms of life, thinking and practice to the edges of collective perception is that in and through this process, boundary markers are set that demarcate observable and rational environments for us to navigate, safe in the knowledge that the unsound, arcane and otherworldly are relegated to the fringes of human experience. More than this, such a demarcation allows us to identify with the notion that we are rational self-centred beings who navigate the world through reason.

 

AI is of particular interest here as it radically alters the mapping of otherworldliness and the position of irrational entities and belief systems that had previously held stable ground in the hinterlands of cultural consciousness. Given the proximity of AI in our daily lives, from searching for cheap holidays and interacting with virtual partners to generating creative content, it has become an intimate presence that forwards not only our hopes, but also our fears. Coupled with this omnipresent dynamic is the speed at which AI is driving towards modes of sentience that are not necessarily human, but which make their own differentiated claim to consciousness. As such, many of our longstanding anxieties about non-human intelligence, whether that be animal, alien or arcane, are now projected onto and through AI.

 

To decipher our complex relationships with algorithms and neural networks, it is instructive to not only understand how we have previously castigated non-human agency into the hidden graves of the uncanny valley but also comprehend how frequency-based phenomena have subsequently transmitted their characteristics into cultural consciousness. As such, it is those very occultural, otherworldly and marginalised entities that we thought were dead and buried that are now coming back to life through technological means; revenant concepts and customs that have been modulated and upgraded to become our intimate companions, virtual popstars, data twins and spectral chatbots. A significant question arising from this recent insertion of otherworldliness into mainstream relationships, economic systems and speculations, is whether we will seek, as we have in the past, to establish clear separations and hierarchies with regards to non-human intelligence. It is our persistent rhythm of projecting the human at the apex of this hierarchy that this project seeks to address. Flattening science, hyperstition, arcane beliefs, constructed languages, technologies and esoteric rituals into a connective tissue composed by and through sonic philosophy, this exhibition is a mixing desk of phantom channels.