Fathoms

AI generated animation, Digital Chromogenic prints

This project is in collaboration with Miljohn Ruperto

It’s all over for the animals in the Clarion-Clipperton zone, a wide swath of the Pacific Ocean. The CCZ’s deep ocean floor has been given over by the International Seabed Authority to mining companies to mine rare earth metals to make your phone. Nature preserves are being set up by marine biologists in the Deep CCZ expedition. These protected areas measure 61,775 square miles, minuscule compared to the area granted to the mining companies which is approximately 400,000 square miles.

During their research, the Deep CCZ expedition have encountered, and continue to encounter numerous undiscovered underwater creatures, emergent animals never seen before. In Fathoms, Small and Ruperto work with data scientists to use artificial intelligence to extrapolate the speculative shapes of emergent animals that visualize new ecosystems. Fathoms speculates a fictional depth which penetrates below the Earth’s crust. Small and Ruperto follow the Greek ocean depth naming convention and announce what lies beyond Hades: the Tartarapelagic Zone. Tartarus is the abyssal dungeon, reserved for divine punishment. It is here Small and Ruperto offer up AI generated sea creatures. These digital creatures are the exemplars of the training data set of animals types culled from each level down the ocean depths:

Epipelagic Zone 0-200 meters
Mesopelagic Zone 200-1000
Bathypelagic Zone 1000-4000
Abyssopelagic Zone 4000-6000
Hadalpelagic Zone 6000-10,994
Tartarapelagic Zone (artists fiction): 10,994-

In a darkened room, the installation of Fathoms (Tartarapelagic) sets up a square monitor presenting a digital slideshow of newly AI generated (in real-time) images of sea animals appearing from and dissolving into darkness.

There are three jokes. The first is an ontological one: that emergent animals appear only through emergent technology: it is only through the recent development of submersible drone technology that we can explore these depths of the ocean floor. The second darker joke is that in the AI generation of these creatures (their forms limited by their data set—so never really “new”), the energy consumption contributes to the real creatures’ demise. In a way, the AI creatures (iterations of the same) replace the real. The last joke, the most painful one, is that beyond the horizon of immanence—the hope in the unfolding of emergent technologies/emergent animals/emergent aesthetics—mining companies have already dominated that beyond.