Living with()

‘blue sky with a million stars at night. A desert without water. An island without wind. There was no other way of describing it, unless you considered a desert the same as an island. You could also describe a room in which all you had to worry about was being buried alive’

Living with() (2022)

‘Just go out, find them, and tell them 'the whole world told us to go look for you. We've been trying to find you for years, we found you in the first place, now we're trying everything we can think of to bring you back, if only you 're still alive. That's what people are.’

I’ve been making up narratives for microorganisms for a while now. I like to follow them around under my microscope, I try to imagine what their experience must be like, if they even experience anything at all. I interpret their behaviour and make up stories for them, projecting my human experience onto them.⁠
I was wondering if an algorithm could collaborate with those microorganisms. If it could make up stories for them in real time. What questions would arise? Is it just projecting human traits onto machines, like we tend to do with robots? Is it even possible for machines to show care?

The interesting questions are found in the implications of the work. Are these microorganisms and the machine really working together? Really telling stories? Or is it just me, who made a lot of decisions beforehand? What literary works do I use to train this neural network needed for story generation? And what does that decision implicate? 

Is it even ‘living with’, when I manually put the microorganisms out of their natural environment and under the microscope?

Media:/microscope/microcontrollers/stepper motors/water/