Embodied Futures invites participants to imagine novel forms of life, mind, and being through artistic and intellectual provocations on April 22.

Beginning at 1 p.m., together we will experience the launch of five artworks commissioned by the Berggruen Institute. We asked these artists: How does your work inflect how we think about “the human” in relation to alternative “embodiments” such as machines, AIs, plants, animals, the planet, and possible alien life forms in the cosmos? Later in the afternoon, we will take provocations generated by the morning’s panels and the art premieres in small breakout groups that will sketch futures worlds, and lively entities that might dwell there, in 2049.

Ecologies of Becoming-With (Bradbury Edition), Sougwen Chung. Sougwen will debut a collaborative drawing performance with a multi-robotic system using spatialized sound and biofeedback. Live experiments with the sonification of mark-making adds a new dimension to the D.O.U.G. (Drawing Operations Unit Generation) practice, asking: what new modes of embodiment can be explored when humans create with responsive machines?

CORPUS, Nancy Baker Cahill. CORPUS imagines a future of blended, embodied entanglement between human, machine, and microbiome in the form of a towering AR “symborg” in the atrium of the Bradbury Building. CORPUS will emerge as a series of constituent metallic and organic particulate elements rendered to resemble an ever-shifting blend of pulsing binary and DNA code.

Voice Gems, REEPS 100. REEPS 100 has been using AI and emerging technologies to push his voice and create new forms of vocal expressions. His work is rooted in the idea that the future of design is generative, and that the most valuable works allow us to observe our most human fundamentals. REEPS 100 will present a new “voice gem” — a data visualization of human voice.

Sounding Life, Brian Cantrell. This immersive sonic experience stages a journey to an alien solar system. The speculative journey into outer space imagines how humans would scan for biosignatures — chemical signs of life — on other planets in the distant future. The artwork proposes the use of ears, rather than eyes, as the primary sense modality for probing the universe for life and environments suitable for life.

Altruism, ARSWAIN. This four-movement original composition proposes that if humans are to truly expand our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. The pieces use granular synthesis, biofeedback, algorithmic modulation — and even an AI co-composer — to generate novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations. For more information click here.