Anicka Yi’s current installation at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is very, very strange. In Love with the World features floating, moving, helium-filled forms Yi calls “aerobes”. These aerobes are based on ocean life forms and mushrooms, that float and propel themselves around the hall. The premise for the exhibition is the question: What would it feel like to share the world with machines that could live in the wild and evolve on their own?
The bulbous aerobes are called “planulae” and the aerobes with jellyfish-tentacles are “xenojellies”. Yi has also created “scentscapes” in the Turbine Hall, notably scents inspired by the history of the Bankside area surrounding Tate Modern, including marine scents from the Precambrian period; odours of vegetation from the Cretaceous period; the scents of spices that were used to counteract the Black Death in the 14th century, and the smell of coal and ozone from the Industrial Revolution.
This re-imagining of artificial intelligence has produced a quite surreal installation/experience. Merging technology and biology the aerobes are programmed to float towards heat, namely the human bodies visiting the space. They have a homing instinct, returning to a “pool” of technicians who recharge the aerobes’ batteries, readying them to fly once more. In one sense they are simply kinetic sculptures, but the effect is not unlike being immersed in an ocean pool, or suspended in air. Yi’s almost peaceful creations subvert the notion of AI as aggressive, potentially harmful, and primed to take over humanity. Instead these aerobes are encountered as if finding them in the wild, a strange mutation to be wondered at, to potentially live alongside as part of an evolving and entangled ecosystem.
