Honey, AI and Camping Out in The Cloud Forest
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
What do honeybee-human relationships have in common with human-AI relationships? Can we think through problems such as racial and gender bias, abelism and negative impacts on the climate by examining honey, bees and the socio-ecological systems in which they flourish?
Radical exploration of such diverse concepts set the groundwork for a conversation between the artist Kate Daudy, and anthropologist of technology and queer theorist, Rebekah Cupitt. We will take you from London's St Pancras Station out to a far flung Cloud Forest, from the salt-lidded oceans of northern Bolivia to a giant-round-swimming-pool stopover in Santa Cruz cruised by albino peacocks and drug lords. You'll encounter unusual creatures - butterflies the size of your hand, tarantulas so close you can see the furry stripes on their legs, a bear, a teenage jaguar and a Coca plantation owner with such a penchant for coca honey he has established himself as a Beekeper.
During the evening seminar, Cupitt and Daudy offer new ways of thinking about the artificial, the intelligent, and what AI might mean. You are invited to join them in thinking about human and non-human pasts, presents and futures, and to peer into the cogs of the big machine that is AI - too often obscured by the tech industry's haze of rhetoric and promise - and imagine together an alternative set of intra-species relations, new paths towards sympoietic futures.
Contact name:
Rebekah Cupitt
- Dr Rebekah Cupitt
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Kate Daudy
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Kate Daudy is a British conceptual artist internationally recognised for her public interventions and large-scale outdoor sculpture. Working across a wide variety of media, she lives and works in London. Daudy’s work deepens our understanding of identity and belonging, at a time when those concepts are both in flux and deeply consequential.
Inventive, complex, and celebratory, Daudy’s work enfolds collaboration with people in all fields: science, digital technology, mathematics, poetry, music, a perfume house, the ancient world and farming. Her personal curiosity leads to thought-provoking and multi-disciplinary work that sheds light on what it means to be a human being.