Opening night Other Intelligences

What forms of intelligence exist? And what significance do they have for our understanding of ecology and society? With the international group exhibition Other Intelligences, MU explores different forms of intelligence that go beyond the human – whether artificial, technological, or rooted in the natural worlds of plants and animals.

The exhibition invites us to reflect on how we understand and empathize with these different ways of knowing. The twelve participating artists each investigate what intelligence means in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). They ask how a synthetic AI brain operates, how organisms from the natural worlds perceive and act, and speculate on what we may learn from these diverse forms of intelligence.

For a long time, the human brain was considered the sole measure of intelligence. However, as artificial intelligence continues to develop abilities once thought to be uniquely human, this view is being called into question. There is a growing call to move beyond the human-centered perspective by recognizing the interconnectedness and equal coexistence of all living organisms and synthetic entities.

In the natural world, intelligence often takes on more decentralized forms. An octopus for instance has a nervous system that extends throughout its eight tentacles, allowing each arm to process information independently. Slime molds can solve complex puzzles, like finding the shortest path through a network, without possessing any neurons. And ants, while individually disorientated, work collectively to form highly organized colonies capable of strategic problem-solving. Machine intelligences on the other hand can either be widely distributed but also very centralized, which entails very different ways of interacting with them.
Other Intelligences brings together these different aspects of more-than-human intelligence, recognizing that understanding and empathizing with other forms of intelligence could become one of our most important survival strategies. Some works reveal processes usually hidden from human perception, while others examine AI-generated imagery and how these images can inspire new narratives, new realities, and alternative ways of being. Still others imagine potential symbioses between synthetic and organic life or even propose transferring agency to more-than-human entities.

Artists: Niculin Barandun, David Bowen, Alice Bucknell, Isabel Bullerschen, CROSSLUCID, Patricia Domínguez, Dotdotdot, Hazal Ertürkan, Joey Holder, Špela Petrič, Sookyun Yang, Yiming Yang

Curators: Sabine Himmelsbach, Marlene Wenger and Angelique Spaninks

Host or Publisher MU Hybrid Art House