When K Allado-McDowell imagines that you immerse yourself in the exhibition “The famous Lost”, the vision unfolds something like this: it is a hot, hectic day in New York City and you slide into the serene gallery that the show organizes.
You see another visitor, standing on a stage with a microphone, surrounded by backgrounds of stone memorials. The visitor sings scientific names of species about a musical score penetrated with sounds of running water and crackling ice. As you listen, the Latin words were about you as meditative mantras: Zuberia Zuberi” Tasmaniosaurus Triassicus, Vegaranina Precocia.
The visitor steps aside. You approach the stage itself and note that it is stacked with six books printed with species names. As you sing and say the names, you will be struck by the enormous size of life. It would take days to honor all these days gone by: Trilobites, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Moss van Tree size, our Jurassic Mammal Ancestors and many other long -lost life forms.
“The strategy here is to think with a deep time to think our sense of origin, but also our feeling of future,” said Allado-McDowell in a video interview from California, referring to the history of 4.5 billion years of the earth.
‘The famous Lost’, which will be shown in the Swiss Institute from 7 May to 7 September, is the first solo exhibition of Allado-McDowell, 47, an artist, writer and musician who uses pronouns. It serves as a space for visitors, as the artist says, “rehearsing” act 1 of a continuously developing opera, of which Allado-McDowell hopes that will be performed at a proposed monument. The idea is that both the opera and the monument pay tribute to the species that are extinct.
The idea came from the previous innovative innovative works of Allado-McDowell. At the height of the Pandemie, Allado-McDowell wrote ‘Pharmakoi-AI’, the first book Co-author of the artificial intelligence program GPT-3-a text-generating AI program developed by OpenAI, the company that launched Chatgpt.
Through written fairs, Allado-McDowell and GPT-3 musings about species loss, plant information and other topics. Allado-McDowell has an example in 2022 in the Lincoln Center “Song of the Ambassadors”, A work-in-progress opera that they co-write with GPT-3 in which singers represent the sun, space and life.
Before the opera, “the concept with which we started, was sound healing in a collective environment,” said Allado-McDowell. In ‘The well -known Lost’ the sound -genoose element is more participatory and the goal is to cure our relationship with extinction collective.
Allado-McDowell, a self-described nature lover, regularly visits the Amazon Register and lives in the mountains of southern California, near an area decimated by the recent forest fires. They said that, in the midst of serious threats for these and other regions, they found it very difficult to think about something than loss and extinction of biodiversity. “
They continued: “So I thought I would take that head, instead of trying to find a way not to think about it.”
In recent years, Alison Coplan, head curator at Swiss Institute, has thought about ways to fulfill the mission of the organization to tackle climate change through art. Intrigued by the opera and the book of Allado-McDowell, she stood out about presenting an experimental show that would generate reflection and dialogue about environmental issues.
In a video interview from New York, Coplan said: “When you are confronted with the reality of our world today, you can easily get overwhelmed and feel paralyzed in terms of climate change.”
“K made this exhibition to take into account a way in which we can concentrate and move forward our energy,” she added.
Allado-McDowell started the process that felt dissociated from extinction, they said. So they were looking for paleobiological databases for all animals, plants, fungi and other beings that have been extinct since life on earth began About 4 billion years ago. They came with a list of 180,285 identified species. This is just a fraction of the true, unknown song. Scientists estimate that some 99 percent Of the approximately 5 to 50 billion species that have ever existed, are extinct.
Allado-McDowell said that personally the humiliating awareness that we know so little was ‘extremely liberating’. They added: “Touching what we don’t know opens a possible way to relate to the world so that we can’t be the center of the universe.”
Allado-McDowell created AI-generated images of stone memorials engraved with this list of species that will hang as theater curtains around the exhibition space. The list also forms the libretto of the opera that visitors will sing or read from the six books near the stage, which represents what many believe as the six massive extinction of the earth.
Initially, Allado-McDowell said that they felt “vague fear” and “intense emotions” about these devastating dying. The first five masses were activated by cataclys such as super volcanic eruptions and the impact of a huge asteroid. Nowadays people drive around 1 million plant and animal species to extinctionAccording to a report from the United Nations. Many scientists call it the Sixth Mass -Diminals.
But when the artist went deep into thinking, they realized that extinction was not always sad. In the past it was a natural process that Set the stage for dynamic eruptions of evolution. The fact that life has repeatedly reflected from the edge of destruction-such as the Perm extinction that has wiped out about 90 percent of the species of the planet. And the absence of T. Rex certainly makes the modern world a more pleasant place. As a result, Allado-McDowell said: “I have put a lot of effort into making this work that really feels sad.”
The backgrounds generated by the AI, shown in uplifting colors such as sky blue and yellow ocher, portray a contemplative memorial complex that is put in towering mountains by a quiet lake. In the images, the monuments rise with species names such as canyon walls above small, almost insignificant people.
Allado-McDowell said the scenes were inspired by deserted Italian marble quarries, where for centuries of white stone were cut from mountain slope. The artist imagined that a memorial was cut directly into one of these extraction places, in which the renewal is poetically illustrated after people driven by people.
The artist hopes to construct a real stone monument with extinction, although the location and details have not yet been determined. Coplan said: “The idea of the rehearsal is that we are all starting to carry out this text, and with that we are starting to make the monument, because it is now in all our thoughts.”
Also in development, ACT 2 of “The famous Lost”, in which species are added to the monument while they disappear from the earth, after the exhibition ends in the Swiss institute. Allado-McDowell said that these additions could be performed ceremonially and broadcast to increase consciousness “while they are also a deeply felt, meaningful ritual.”
For Allado-McDowell, creating this exhibition has been ‘a process of healing’ that brought them from dissociation and fears to a state of informed humility. They realized that considering the role of people in an in -depth story gives us a choice.
“You could look at it in a way that is passive or nihilistic, that it doesn’t matter what I do because time is so long,” they said. “Or you could see that you are part of a cumulative process and everything you really matter.”
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