Developed in conversation with philosopher Cansu Canca, Equal Rights was made in the context of the exhibition The New States of Being at Centre d'Exposition de l'Universitié de Montréal - where six artists were paired with six bioethicists to engage with some of the issues associated with AI, bioethics and health
When we talk about recent developments in Artificial Intelligence we often ask the question: Is it for good? But good for whom? We are only one of an estimated 8.3 million species on Earth. If we are to develop a truly ethical AI, surely it’s necessary to shift this anthropocentric bias and to consider health in a radically expanded sense - one that places equal emphasis on the wellbeing of the other-than-human species and ecologies with which our existence and survival is entangled?
Twenty two marble fragments, naturally eroded from the peak of a mountain by eons of weathering, have each had three intersecting faces rubbed into them by hand, then cast in bronze. Marble is composed of the metamorphosed exoskeletons of microscopic sea creatures. The marble fragments impacted with evidence of human intervention read as cyphers for the relationship between humanity and our technologies, and other-than-human systems and ecologies. The objects are weighed on a functioning balance that alludes to the application of ethics to the biotic and abiotic entities that it supports. Inside the pyramidal base of the sculpture a nickel plated nylon three-dimensionally printed human brain alludes to the fusion of organic and inorganic neural reasoning networks that we see in the world today