Machinic Meditations

A Kinetic Art Installation. This artwork transforms the found object of digital counter beads, commonly found in the region into a kinetic art installation- where a mechanized motor based arm continuously rotates the bead instead of a human hand. The artist creates a diptych work- with 2 such units of mechanized system. These are conceptualized to represent AI server racks in an AI data center. The diptych represents one server rack ‘meditating’ on human data and another ‘meditating’ on resources of energy and water to carry out the computations and functioning of the data center.

In the former server rack, with each bead rotation- the system reads a new point in a human dataset. The counter resets after 32 counts, and picks on a new batch of human data points to process or meditate through. In the latter the machine reads into new resource availabilities of energy and water to keep functioning- a data center uses upto 2 million litres of clean drinking water daily and 250,000 kWH per day.

The work looks to bring up questions around the evolving nature of ritualistic practices in a time of Artificial Intelligence. When machines clear level 1 of knowing everything, what are ways in which they evolve to go beyond and build cultural and ritualistic practices of their own? Count keeping which is central to cultural practices across humanity, is central and fundamental to computer systems too- a clockwork precision of meditations on human data and climate resources (the entities that create them and make them function).

The work pokes at the question of ‘automating’ human labor broadly too- we began by outsourcing most of our mundane tasks to machines, and today we already speak of ‘automating’ creative labor. Does this indicate a shift to automating spiritual labor too? We continue evolving new practices for the AI world, like scrolling through our phones whilst potentially transferring the labor of existing practices like scrolling through beads to machines?