Reflecting on the uncomfortable and problematic cultures of factory farming and robotics simultaneously, Gallus gallus roboticus offers a counter-narrative within ever-present tensions in the relationship between Technology and Nature, and their invented separation. Developing a flock of speculative robotic prototypes that can intimately tend to diverse facets of a chicken’s needs and wants have been at the center of this research project, in an attempt to develop a post-natural bird/machine symbiosis.
A ROBOT FOR THE MORE HUMANE TREATMENT OF CHICKENS?
The robots, which are in part powered by chicken faeces and capable of understanding the chicken language, conjure alternate futures – which include machine-assisted rewilding of domesticated creatures, anthropo-decentric Artificial Intelligence, and the radical distribution of technological agency and power – adding a novel, and somewhat absurd, set of concerns to the ever-growing list of contemporary socio-ecological technological quandaries.
In this non-human centered speculative design piece, the uncanny valley-inducing autonomous machines will affectionately care for the chickens, posing a question to the viewer whether machines are perhaps more capable of being humane than humans.
Wondering whether Gallus gallus domesticus, the domesticated chicken, could be considered – within the framework of the Anthropocene – the most or least successful bird from an evolutionary perspective, the project stems from a morbid fascination with the current and historical relationship between chickens and humans and the intricacies and problematics of selective breeding, symbiosis, domestication, animal rights, farming practices, and food safety and security which riddle this narrative.
Our livestock and agriculture have been selectively bred for thousands of years. But have we gone too far with the chicken, which could be considered a work of engineering itself? We’ve developed broilers that grow four times faster than wild chickens, and egg laying chickens that produce eggs daily. The Chicken of Tomorrow is a case of economics outrunning ethics, and ultimately only a shift towards a moral economy can reclaim the chicken’s evolutionary fitness function back from corporate profit.
CHICKENS FOR THE MORE HUMANE DEVELOPMENT OF ROBOTS?
Finding ourselves in a moment where the development of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics is growing seemingly exponentially, and at a rate faster than ethical critique and legislation (and Deepfake detection software), can keep up, humanity risks getting stuck in techno-quicksand. This will probably not manifest in the way that has been tritely depicted in Western Sci-Fi for the last 99 years, since the invention of the term “Robot”, with red-eyed rebellious androids uprising against their human dominators, but more insidiously and in a dense series of events; in forms such as techno-colonialism, an increasing inequality of wealth and power in the hands of a few, an automation-addicted economic climate leading to continued environmental degradation and workforce insecurity, or maybe even something as banally dystopic as a Paperclip Maximizer scenario. While the development of AI increasingly affects many aspects of our globally-connected ‘private’ lives, these of course need to be pre-programmed with a set of ethics. But, whose ethics should they be programmed with? Gallus Gallus Roboticus aims to amplify this problem and send it into absurd territory by defying the eminent yet inadequate Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, and make a Robot that is programmed to primarily protect and obey “orders” given to it by chickens.
PERHAPS AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WHO IS RAISED BY CHICKENS WOULD IN FACT CREATE A LESS PROBLEMATIC MACHINE THAN ONE WHO IS TRAINED ON DATASETS CONSTRUCTED BY HUMANS FOR, ULTIMATELY, ANTHROPOCENTRIC, CAPITALISTIC GOALS.
META
This website has been the information repository of our process so far, and as such continues to document our process and research as we (Daniel Brownell and Miranda Moss) develop the project, while corona-separated by 10000km. Feel free to explore the chaos of references, research and development of the AI which can be found in the menus at the top of the page.
This project is being developed within, and with the financial support of The konS Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art. Thanks konS!
