Cyborgs for Rebellion (Eric Millikin) — AFT

Eric Millikin

Cyborgs for Rebellion

“Cyborgs for Rebellion" is an infinitely rotating series of AI-generated, poetry-reading, three-dimensional portraits recently projected over two nights onto a 225+-year-old oak tree in a public park in the woods of Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy during the American Civil War.

This oak tree is in a wooded area where enslaved people gathered for Gabriel’s Rebellion 222 years ago. By my rough calculations based on the current circumference of the tree, this oak tree was present for this gathering of rebels. This tree is around 225 to 276 years old, meaning this tree perhaps provided cover while planning that rebellion, or maybe it was just an acorn at the time, just one of many seeds being planted that day, still growing now.

222 years is roughly seven generations. In discussion with Bridget Baumgartner of Revive & Restore, we talked about designing technologies while thinking seven generations ahead. Here, I am simultaneously thinking seven generations back in time — were they (both the enslaved and the enslavers) thinking about where we would be today? — as well as thinking seven generations into the future — what injustices are we doing to each other today that we will more clearly recognize 222 years from now?

I created these 3D portraits with a new system of artificial intelligence that I custom coded and trained on images of Gabriel (“Prosser”), Nat Turner, John Brown, and other slave rebellion instigators primarily from Virginia, as well as robots from America’s most critically acclaimed and top-grossing science fiction films, such as Metropolis, Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Star Wars.

I also trained the AI on symbolic more-than-human biological materials, including periwinkle, which has an on-going mutualistic symbiotic relationship with enslaved Americans. Periwinkle was one of the wildflowers enslaved Americans most often placed on their loved ones’ graves; this dispersed and planted the periwinkle seeds, and the resulting plants’ resilient offspring are alive today, leading researchers to find lost grave sites.

In discussion with Magul of One People One Reef, we discussed the concept of “kilo,“ the art of listening to nature. I am thinking of the interspecies communication between humans and plants in this project — the 222 year oak tree listening at a rebel meeting and then speaking to us today, the periwinkle flowers leading descendants to the graves of their ancestors — as possible two-way forms of “kilo.”

Each of the incantation poems was generated by another AI I created, that writes poetry based on historical documents like court records that quote the participants of the rebellions, and Kindred, Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 novel of time-travel to a slave plantation.

The poems each start with the beginning of Gabriel’s brother Solomon testifying after their 1800 attempt to end slavery in Virginia, “My brother Gabriel was …” and ends with the last line of Kindred, referencing a “… chance of staying that way.”

Part of the idea behind this project was to take AI that is more typically used for surveillance, control, and the reinforcement of existing societal power structures, and instead to try to teach an AI to imagine a more rebellious, inclusive, freedom-loving future humanity.

These ideas were in part shaped by discussion with Bogdana Rakova of the Mozilla Foundation on “Sustainable AI: Algorithms and Social Justice,” where I am thinking particularly about how AI could be used as an ecosystem to support more just, more mutualistic symbiotic interconnections between humans, other living beings, and machines.

Throughout this project, I have thought of the “Witchy Way” as discussed with Hannu Rajaniemi, in particular thinking about how we might erase boundaries between ourselves and the other, in this case boundaries between human, other living organisms, and machines. I also think of the poetry as a form of incantation, and the creation of AI cyborgs as a form of summoning, both of which are traditional motifs of witchcraft, of particular interest to me as a descendant of women executed during the Salem Witch Trials.

This is the final, in-progress cyborg created for this project. If it had been finished, this cyborg would have been the 695th created by the most recent version of this system. I discovered this cyborg had crashed the system a few hours after the final night of the exhibition. I am currently planning how I mutate this system and where this type of system goes next.

Huge thanks to David S. Kong and all other Ancient Future Technologists for your help and inspiration in shaping “Cyborgs for Rebellion.”

“Cyborgs for Rebellion” was exhibited November 18-19, 2022, as part of the InLight exhibition by 1708 Gallery at Bryan Park in Richmond, Virginia, USA. Huge thanks to curators Tiffany E. Barber and Wesley Taylor, project manager Unicia Buster, and everyone who visited.

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