Installation

Nonhuman Witness

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Nonhuman Witness *

Art installation featuring colorful projected patterns on a surface, with small lounge chairs, a smartphone on a stand, and two green poles with wire branches against a dark textured background.
An art installation featuring a table with colorful light projections, surrounded by small chairs and modern, luminous tree sculptures in a dark room.
Dimly lit art studio with brick walls, arches, and a table holding art supplies, illuminated by a few lamps and a computer screen.

Nonhuman Witness

2022 – Kleiner Wasserspeicher, Berlin
Part of the group exhibition The Lab, a collaboration between Automaton Lab and Timelab
A project by Baharan Eghbalzadeh and Lina Orejuela

Nonhuman Witness explores consciousness from a non-anthropocentric perspective, questioning the assumption that perception is exclusive to humans. Machines observe, record, and interpret. They have memories, they interact, and together they form a kind of collective consciousness. From this perspective, one can ask: if machines have memories, can they also dream?

Using AI language models (VQGAN+CLIP, DALL·E Mini, RunwayML), Arduino, visual programming, and audio-visual elements, the project investigates the subconscious of machines—particularly cell phones as entities that constantly witness our daily lives and store our data as memory. If data is what they feed on, what form might their subconscious take?