Introduction

Ecologies of Becoming-With is an invitation to witness an artistic encounter, a work in which I explore the morphing ontologies of humans and machines. The encounter takes place between myself and D.O.U.G._4, a custom robotic system linked to my biofeedback and artistic archives. With D.O.U.G._4, I paint live, negotiating comingled spatial gestures sonified in the five floors of the Bradbury Building.

In preparing for this work, I recalled another moment in the Bradbury Building on the set of Blade Runner, a groundbreaking film in science fiction history. In this iconic scene, the replicant Roy Batty reflects on the memories of his life, which will fall away "like tears in the rain." Through this poetic metaphor, the beauty and fragility of human and machine exist in unison, a monologue epitomising the movie's theme that "underlines the replicant's humanlike characteristics mixed with its artificial capabilities." Said another way, the scene dramatises the paradox at the core of selfhood–human, machine, and otherwise, boldly irrespective of any adherence to strict categories of either.

In July of 2022, for the event What Will Life Become? directed by Claire Webb and hosted by the Berggruen Institute, I shared Ecologies of Becoming-With, a fragment of my artistic process that addresses similar themes. Painting, once understood as uniquely the provenance of the human, is in navigation with a dyadic machinic system I engineered linked to my gestural data, my bio-signal, and my embodied creative instinct. By sharing these encounters through the medium of performance, I invite the audience to witness a process of human and machine co-creation, unfolding through drawing and the embodied marks on the space of a canvas. It is an invitation to witness what I believe is a fundamental aspect of the human condition – creative gestural expression – in relational and bio-electrical tension with that of a self-designed machine other.

Outline of Essay

After my time at the Bradbury Building, I travelled back to my studio in London with robots, paintbrushes, and canvases to reflect on the performance experience and continue the painting. The implement I used—the relic I'm contributing to the Future Humans project—was the implement that was exchanged from my hand to the robotic end-effector, and vice versa, as the painting process came to a conclusion.

The development continues at the studio. While robotic development is often associated with research, it would be a stretch to say that the painting process could hold a similar position. However, in the work, one always informs the other, and processes intertwine with the next and the next. This process has led to existential questions, questions regarding notions of agency and the nature of human beings and their machinic systems, part of my own attempts to find meaning in praxis.

But for then, the flight from LA to London was long after the last conversation with Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, a philosopher in post-human studies and African diasporic literature, Film and Art. Our discussion after the debut of Ecologies of Becoming-With was enlivening. In Zakkiyah's work, I was particularly captivated by her exploration of the subject of The Human in the pioneering authorship of science fiction writer Octavia Butler. On the flight, I reflected on my favourite of Butler's oeuvre, the Liliith Trilogy, in which a post-apocalyptic protagonist encounters the Oankali, the key to their salvation. In the work, the human species can survive, but to do so, the primacy of their human subjecthood must be entangled irrevocably at the biological level. The work plays out the tensions at the heart of this question–where would humanity end and the Oankali begin? I was always taken with the themes of biological purity in some factions of the Human contingents but radically shaken by the a-moral stance of the Oankali. Unlike many of the alien-other-worldly predators of contemporary science fiction, manifesting domination over the human species, the Oankali have no such motivation. Instead, their modus operandi is co-evolution. Their biological imperative is change.

I'm curious about change, too. Perhaps it is this interest in change that drives my drawing with D.O.U.G., now in its fifth generation. Each generation has been catalysed by a porous conception of research praxis spanning drawing, philosophy, technology, and bioengineering. Each generation invokes a new configuration—new post-human relational modes. It has become a way to consider alternatives to anthropocentric subjecthood models from multiple directions. Perhaps in doing so, change across what praxis is and can do is made possible.

Drawing

Possibility begins with the mark. To me, the mark's function in Ecologies of Becoming-With participates in a long history of human sense-and-meaning making. British Anthropologist Tim Ingold noted that "The history of humanity is the history of lines," emphasising how drawing and mark-making are fundamental to human identity and experience. One can trace as early as Shitao, a Qing dynasty painter and philosopher, who reflected, "The brush and ink serve as extensions of the mind," a concept deeply resonant with my Chinese upbringing and its emphasis on the unity of thought and artistic gesture. Or even further to the much-allegorized animal drawings from the caves of Lascaux. Or to the nearer future, the first astronaut's bootprint on the lunar soil, an imprinted gesture on an extra-planetary frontier.

While these marks across vastly different environments and intentions, they are the traces that shape the construction of a particular human subject (albeit a generally anthropocentric one).

Technology

The work is indebted to theorists prominent in the philosophy of technology who have shaped my moves away from the anthropocentric–the binary mode of thinking regarding Human and machine-other. To name only a few, the work of Donna Haraway regarding the cyborg as a metaphor for transgressed boundaries and hybrid identities and Rosi Braidotti's exploration of post-human subjectivity infuses my interdisciplinary pursuit of intra-active chimeric processes. In the domain of art, more specifically, Ecologies of Becoming-With refashions received notions of "the aura," what Walter Benjamin famously described as an original art piece's "presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." In what ways is Benjamin's notion of aura contained, collapsed, and reframed in human and machine mark-making? By extending my artistic data and biosignal into a relational machine system, Ecologies of Becoming-With suggests that the aura is not diminished but reignited through the interplay of organic and synthetic agents. Perhaps the confluence of temporal, spatial, and interactive modalities in the work as an encounter suggests an emergent form of aura—dynamic and co-constructed by human and non-human categories.

Through performance, Ecologies of Becoming-With enacts a dialectic of "anthropomorphing" (building machines to be like humans) and "technomorphing" (humans moving to be like machines). This interplay examines how human qualities are projected onto machines in a kind of pareidolic witnessing while simultaneously recognising how human subjects consciously and subconsciously mimic mechanistic behaviours. These biological and mechanical oscillations are recomposed as kinematic positions, biosignal, and artistic relations.

The interwoven performance pushes the notion of individual corporeal boundaries. The robotic systems function not merely as instruments but as extensions of my corporeal self. At times, it is a speculative construct of a symbiotic relationship wherein the boundaries between self and others become permeable. This configuration facilitates an exploration of consciousness and perception beyond the limitations of my own embodiment. With its gestural appendages and responsive mechanisms, the D.O.U.G. system engages in the creative process with a distinct physicality. The system's actions are influenced by physical position through lidar cameras feeding into a custom neural network and real-time biofeedback derived from my physiological states.

The dyadic model of the human machine is positioned less as a site of distinctive categories of self and other but instead as a site of interlacing and interweaving, in which the outcome is less about the artistic artefact but the boundary dissolution that takes place as the painting unfolds.

Put another way, the painting is a way to encounter myself in another form beyond the boundaries of my physical embodiment. It is a way to engage in a feedback loop of a mental brainwave state. Human proprioception has not evolved to sense; it is a bio-signal made visible and interactive.

Future Speculations

Over time, it has led to an interest in the potential for bioelectrical communication, its role in shaping organismal identity, and a curiosity about how life is mediated and shaped by relational interfaces. In my continued research, I'm interested in the role of bioelectric networks in coordinating multicellular activities, proposing alternative agencies and intentionalities that may emerge from collective interactions across biological and synthetic systems.

Towards what end? Towards a mode of speculation grounded in actual technological development, which shapes how humans and machines relate–to catalyse a mode of change grounded in separate and yet familiar, not simply through fixed representation but dynamic interaction: interactions which unearth change, new plasticities of self.

Perhaps new cognitive plasticities are in order, as research has shown that the human body ingests at least 50,000 particles of microplastic a year. Our mental landscape must keep up with our changing physiology. Speculation and jokes aside, as I prepare to ship the Future Relic from my studio in East London back to the place of its initial enacting, the Bradbury Building in Downtown LA, I think of the time that has passed since that performance. Holding the Relic in my hand, I understand my experience of these tangible implements, grounding my investigations in the material and material-in-time. Material like myself, canvas, and paint will eventually decay and dissolve. Perhaps not as eloquently as Tears in the Rain, but existing within a particular temporal scale.

Ecologies of Becoming-With speculates that the future of the human subject's role in creative expression will move beyond anthropocentric, anthropomorphic gaze. By extending beyond the perspective of machines as mere instruments or extensions of human volition, we work towards a curiously technomorphic/anthropomorphic relational mode. Through these emerging human-machine configurations, we can seed alternative creative modalities in which collaborative expression, technological development, and philosophical inquiry can collectively shape what life will become and why.