Existential crises of conscious machines: reflections on the machine-like condition through art and speculative philosophy

Thinking about science and technology from the humanities allows us to project the type of society we want to be in the future. We must be aware that, to face the current challenges, we have to break down the cultural divisions and understand the world in a transversal way. Now, thanks to scientific and technological development, we know that we will never know everything; we need to learn and live with uncertainty and mystery. Creative thinking, and specifically art, is a practice that allows us to explore the unknown without seeking an absolute answer to everything since sometimes there is simply no answer, but new questions that are a priori unimaginable.

In my recent artistic practice, I have devoted my studies to our relationship with technology, focusing on the social role of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and intertwining critical thinking with technical experimentation. My goal is to open and inhabit a crack of thought on today’s techno-scientific challenges, using art and imagination as tools.

Through the development of different electronic art pieces, I have allowed myself to imagine post-singular artificial identities embodied in conscious robots, through which I have been creating a set of speculative narratives about alternative technologies. These artificial entities flee from dystopian projections and are always endowed with a multiple subject condition, acting as a social reflex.

As an allegory, these pieces represent the evolution of technological objects in organic systems, proposing a way of understanding technologies as something separate from human beings and inviting to value machines in their own genesis. In this essay, I review the conceptual bases of my artistic research, showing practical examples and defending speculative art as a tool to reformulate the imaginaries imposed by the dominant narrative, redefining our role in the new technosocial cosmology.