Madelyn Byrd / Slowfoam

Residency period: March 2021
Website / Instagram / Soundcloud

As part of an ongoing investigation about the digitization of the natural world, Sky, AI explores the relationship between the human body, the planetary body, and our technological twins. Our first body – the sensing, human body – is more similar to our second body – our shared planetary body – than we are capable of understanding.

According to Daisy Hildyard, “To be a living thing is to exist in two bodies. Your first body is the place you live in, made out of your own personal skin. Your second body is not so solid as the other one, but much larger. This second body is your own literal and physical biological existence – it is a version of you. It is not a concept, it is your own body.”

But, the physical limitations of perception constrict our ability to see beyond our first body; we belong to our second body just as much as we belong to our first. By juxtaposing both bodies in a digital space, we can separate from our ego and see the two as equally unfamiliar forms, subject to conscious reframing. The laws of the digital universe are liberated from the physical limitations of the perceptibly natural realm, and within it the physics of time and space can bend and morph in unnatural ways. If our digital twins can co-exist alongside us, how can their existence help us connect to and better understand ourselves and our second bodies?

In Sky, AI, these relationships are revealed through video, sound, and sculpture, utilizing a variety of mediums spliced together to convey the emotional landscape of a rather abstract concept. Additionally, the sound and video piece, created in collaboration with artificial intelligence, begs the question: are our digital twins more aware of us than we realize?