These images were taken with video during the residency in the Labradors kennel. I processed these images with an A.I. This idea was inspired by the "contact zone" with labradors but also by James Bridle's book WAYS OF BEING: Animals, Plants, Machines: The search for a Planetary Intelligence.

What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans or shared with other beings— beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in “artificial” intelligence. But rather than a friend or companion, AI increasingly appears to be something stranger than we ever imagined, an alien invention that threatens to decenter and supplant us.

At the same time, we’re only just becoming aware of the other intelligences that have been with us all along, even if we’ve failed to recognize or acknowledge them. These others — the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us — are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we've built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics to live better and more equitably with one another and the nonhuman world?

My work can be seen as a progression inside the relationship between A.I., animal and human. At the beginning the A.I. processed the images of the labradors by creating random computer-generated images and then I created an oil painting based on one of these images produced by A.I.

At the same time the oil paintings, on one side, and the images directly generated by A.I., on the other, can be seen as two parallel worlds. Two sci-fi image-narratives that evoke future worlds that refer to different possible assemblages generated by the intertwined relationship between 3 different intelligences: the animal, the artificial and the human. These different assemblages give a different aesthetic connotation in a continuum that goes from the human to the non-human and from the futuristic to the romantic but they also project different utopias or distopias. Our intelligent future is open to different outputs, compositions and singularities.