Navigating Critical Zones: Indeterminate and Intimate Geographies

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_e_02339 ©2023 ISAST Navigating critical zones is one way to describe our life today. It is also a tribute to the legacy of Peter Weibel (see supplemental material for Jürgen Claus’s artistic tribute), a giant in our field and a force of life in our world. We grieve his death interwoven with gratitude for his life. Peter’s work explored earth as a network of critical zones, experimenting with new modes of coexistence between all forms of life. Navigating critical zones connects digital activism with earthly politics, traversing indeterminate and intimate geographies of personal space and collective conscience. How do humans intersect and connect with nonhuman intelligence? We are increasingly interdependent with nonhuman intelligence that permeates daily life as over 6.6 billion people worldwide, and 97% of Americans, use smartphones [1] today. Artificial intelligence guides GPS maps, navigation, search engines, recommendation algorithms, social media, facial recognition, autocorrect, text editors, e-payments, and more. AI’s pervasive, exponential growth generates countless opportunities for collaboration and reimagination of social systems overdue for an overhaul. It also raises fear, insecurity, anxiety, and unanswered questions. How do we adapt to a future we cannot foresee? Individuals and institutions grapple with how to control, contain, and constrain AI, simultaneously trying to leverage or harness the potential of current creative disruptors like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and chatSonic. Rather than attempt to outsmart or outpace AI, we need to out-humanize it, by infusing our techno-relationships with our sense of humility, humor, playfulness, curiosity, intuition, empathy, joy, vulnerability, courage, unpredictability, spontaneity, creativity, generosity. This may be a long, incomplete, imperfect list, but it’s a good start. These are core qualities needed for a symbiotic relationship with AI. We don’t need to humanize technology; we need to humanize ourselves in relation to it. Ironically, we may become even more human and more humane by engaging with AI as active partners and co-creators. This issue of Leonardo explores how to navigate the emerging entanglement between human bodies, nonhuman intelligence and lifeforms. Doing so exposes the indeterminacy of AI and the intimacy of personal geographies, social histories, disability and sexuality, the vulnerability of dislocation and abiding connection to place. As a collaborative art-science project, Lovewear embeds haptic feedback into everyday garments for disabled women. TransHuman Saunter, a geolocative, interactive artwork in the Brisbane City Botanical Gardens, offers four artists’ collaborative digital experiments centered around the Indian banyan tree. Each artist integrates their distinct cultural identity and experience of otherness as women of color in Australia. Compelling stories offer an “empathy gym” to exercise muscles of imagination and compassion for perspectives outside of ourselves. Creative storytelling can unify people across entrenched, yet artificially constructed, social barriers and divisions. Physiologically, when we collectively focus on a cognitive narrative, our heart rates and the rhythm of our breath sync together. We get on the same wavelength, attuned to one another and receptive to empathic cooperation, collaboration, and collective wisdom. This is the power of storytelling, the power of creative captivation, the power of recognizing we are part of something bigger than ourselves. The sense of “being in the presence of something vast beyond our understanding of the world” [2] defines awe, a critical experience for evolving the most humane aspects of human nature [3]. Ultimately, increasing the collective understanding and experience of awe helps us navigate earth’s critical zones and the complex entanglement of diverse intelligences and lifeforms, leading to a symbiotic future in an interspecies world.