On Ducks, Turks & the Apocalypse

This on-going project, titled in reference to famous 17th century automata as the Digestive Duck and the Mechanical Turk, revolves around the emergence of "mechanized" subjectivity, inextricably linked to Modernity's central narratives. Through hybrid imagery, sci-fi poetic narration, and ML-based generative processes, the work reflects on modes of alienation and exhaustion, from industrial to digital regimes of labor and computation.
Contrary to many past and present techno-scientific views that often reduce intelligence to abstract mathematical properties, the project focuses on the materiality of information and cognition, looking at human memory and consciousness as emergent properties deeply intertwined with the emotional qualities that a suffering living organism experiences.