Garden of Ghost Flowers (to be seen in the STRP Expo) is a virtual life form that grows thanks to contact with human visitors. As a source of energy, the virtual flower depends on networks of human qualities such as listening, caring, and adapting. By immersing yourself in the technologies of the Garden of Ghost Flowers, your senses as a visitor will gradually be exchanged with those of the virtual flora. Voices will distort and become visible. The Ghost Flower influences and creates the connection not with what you are but rather what you are part of. Will the human visitors to the garden become one with the technology they use? Or will they be controlled by it? Where does the human end and the flower begin?

From the perspective of the human voice, Garden of Ghost Flowers is a verbally abstract and visually concrete experience. A conversation about it requires the opposite. What could be a more decentralised form of thinking, speaking, and listening together? STRP Scenario #18: Infinite Conversations reflects on the – often difficult to frame – topics of non-human computer use and wilderness in the digital garden. The Scenario starts with a keynote lecture by media philosopher Yuk Hui on the infinite imaginative power of artificial intelligence. Then Lundahl & Seitl and Untold Garden invite you to the 'Infinite Conversations' experience, which is performed in complete darkness. In this space, various conversations take place under the guidance of invisible guides. Human microphones capture conversations for the online visitors who can also take part in the dialogue. Listen in the dark, be inspired by the effects of resonance and discover how you as an individual can become part of infinite conversations.

STRP Scenario #18 is part of a series of talks that follows the creation process of the Garden of Ghost Flowers, which is hosted by Magasin III and STRP. The Infinite Conversation was first shown 2011 in “PerformanceExhibition” curated by Richard Julin at Magasin lll Museum of Contemporary Art. For Scenario #18, the artwork lay as a ground for thinking together about the Philosophy of Yuk Hui in relation to the Garden of Ghost Flowers.

Programme

16:00 - 16:15: Opening and introduction
16:15 - 16:45: Keynote Yuk Hui - Imagination of the Infinite: a critique of AI
16:45 - 17:15: Q&A with the audience, moderated by Miriam Rasch
17:15 - 17:30: Break
17:30 - 19:00: Infinite Conversations

Lundahl & Seitl (SE) and Untold Garden (SE & UK)
Lundahl & Seitl is a Stockholm and London-based duo that works with simulated realities in interactive, time-specific installations. The duo creates immersive experiences and uses them as a philosophical tool to explore the boundaries and connections between life, objects and technologies, and places and environments.

Untold Garden is a Stockholm and London-based experiential art studio that makes art installations, virtual sculptures, interactive performances, artificial ecologies, and organic social networks. The studio collaborates with engineers, scientists, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and others from all over the world.

Yuk HUI (HK)
Yuk HUI studied Computer Engineering at the University of Hong Kong and did his PhD in Philosophy at Goldsmiths College in London. Yuk HUI is specialized in Philosophy of Technology, Media Philosophy, Natural Philosophy, Cybernetics, and Artificial Intelligence. Yuk HUI is the author of books such as On the Existence of Digital Objects (2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China, An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2016/2019), and Art and Cosmotechnics (2021) and works as a teacher and writer worldwide.

Miriam Rasch (NL)
Miriam Rasch is a philosopher, writer, and research coordinator at the Willem De Kooning Academy. As an essayist and critic, she writes for Philosophy Magazine, Follow The Money and De Groene Amsterdammer, among others. In 2017 she published her book Swimming in the Ocean: Messages from a Post-Digital World and in 2020 she published her book Friction: Ethics in Times of Dataism, which was awarded the Socrates Cup for best philosophical work in 2021.