So what do we do, just one clap?
Are you going to go first and then me?
Where do you get your ideas from?
That's an almost unanswerable question,
but I'll try. I'm sort of just actively tapped into the world around me,
and I'm thinking about some of the bigger questions
surrounding our existence today
and thinking about, you know , our role
and our sort of symbiotic relationship
to other living and non-living forms.
What particular areas of science have informed the piece?
I have been very much influenced by microbiology,
synthetic biology and a lot of A.I. research.
I was wondering how the history of Bankside
and this building has fed into the work?
What I wanted to do is to create an aquarium of machines
and to imagine a natural history of machines.
I wanted to tie in our moment today
with a broader historical moment of the Turbine Hall site.
So the history of Bankside was a huge
sort of inspirational starting point for the project.
I was thinking about the origins of a,
you know, the sort of industrial revolution
which really the epicenter was London and
and the original use of Turbine Hall.
And as this, you know, energy conversion site.
What made you decide to include smells in the exhibition?
So the smells they function in a really critical way
in that they underscore the the larger theme around air
as this substrate that ties
everything, everyone into the project.
The odors do refer to these different historical periods.
They're more interpretations of these periods that are important
in the sort of evolution of where we are today in the Bankside.
So we have pre-historical scents, you know, Jurassic Cretaceous.
We also have Roman and Black Death and Tudor and Machine Age odors.
And this is a way to also allow for the aerobes
to learn about life on Earth through these historical scentscapes.
Hi Anicka, how do they fly?
Well, they fly
through a fully autonomous sort of system,
essentially software, and they're able to,
you know, sort of establish a
establish a flight envelope within the space so that they can fly
and not bump into each other or
other sort of walls and surfaces in the space.
None of us could predict what they will do from one moment to the next,
and that's what's really exciting about the project.
What's the difference between the balls with no tentacles
and the ones with five tentacles?
Well, there's two different species in the hall.
And one is called the xenojellies, and the xenojellies are more curious
about the human visitors and other visitors that come into the hall.
They're more interested in potentially communicating
with the humans
and reading their heat signatures, and that's how they're able
to sort of track the human visitors.
'Zino' meaning 'foreign'.
I wanted these machines to be curious about some things
that they had never seen before.
Whereas the other species, the planula, they're less social per se.
And what they do is they interact with the xenojellies.
So they're communicating with each other
throughout the airspace in the Turbine Hall.
Hi, Anicka.
My question is about your choice of creatures that you have created.
I'm wondering whether you've thought about any other lifeforms?
Well, I was definitely thinking of biological entities and marine life
Something like jellyfish, but also because, you know,
to sort of underscore this sort of aquarium aquatic
kind of quality to the installation, but also to
a kind of
fungal intelligence and a fungal network.
And so I borrowed a lot from mushrooms and jellyfish
sort of amoeba microorganisms and those kinds of shapes.
Yeah, just as I walked in and I see this whole display,
it's sort of a therapeutic experience.
It sort of relieves anxiety just because of the way these objects are moving.
Do you see machines serving a therapeutic purpose?
Absolutely.
I think they're already doing that all along.
There are countless examples of machines
soothing human
anxieties and frailties and in all manners.
So yes.
And I think that we shouldn't be shy about,
you know, getting it where we can't.
It's quite colorful and it's quite awesome.
And like, it's quite a wonderful thing to look at.
Do you have quite a positive vision of the future?
So I do have a positive vision of the future.
We still have the potential to
to mitigate a lot of the climate problems that we're facing,
and we still have time to steer the research around to A.I.
as well as, you know, all manners of, you know, how biotechnology.
So the point is to have a greater literacy
and more rigorous dialogues, and art is really wonderful that way
because we're able to introduce these ideas
that are quite dense and a lot of times,
you know, sort of very hard to penetrate and we're able
to do that in a much more sort of impactful way
through an experience that isn't as heavy handed,
maybe as if you were to read a 500 page textbook on artificial intelligence.
But certainly, it's a point of entry to start that conversation.
It's really cool. I really like it.
I love how sincere and and really like this wonderful sample of the audience.
It's just it makes me feel like I'm almost kind of back in London
talking to the audience. It's really nice.