Ann Lislegaard What Does the Owl Say? Text by Paulina Sokolow

making politics in an empty habitat
clǐck˘clǎck klɔnk!
Rachael?/ Rachael?/ Rachael?/ Rachael?/

Ann Lislegaard has spent three decades exploring the frontiers of technology. She has emphasised the specific, vague territories where new innovations are still in testing, having not yet been introduced into people’s everyday lives—the tipping points where any mistake might lead to unexpected breakthroughs or broken dreams. Will this novelty aid human self-understanding, or simply become a destructive force in our lives? 

Ann Lislegaard’s works, which often possess a hypnotic quality, pose a challenge to us all: they remind us that we have a choice. From her speculative space, which is filled with old myths, various idea systems, and advanced technologies, she watches curiously, like a contemporary philosopher, along for the ride on a mission to explore the future. From her lookout post, facing the Universe, she poses the most fundamental question of all through her holographic installations, computer-generated images and animations of animals: now that we will soon be able to replace every part of our bodies, now that avatars are capable of independent development and can experience emotions, now that automatons are becoming more intelligent and creative than we are—what distinctive quality remains uniquely human? 

Her work is informed by some of her favourite minds from the world of science fiction. Ursula Le Guin (1929–2018) contributes optimism and the unique freedom that the genre provides for unrestricted speculation, beyond prevailing norms and hegemonic value systems. As early as the 1950s, Le Guin, inspired by the mystical aspects of religion and the ideas of feminism and cultural anthropology, wove worlds in which gender, race, degrees of humanity, anthropological value systems and age were fluid concepts, and constructed entire societies based on premises radically different from those of our own. While most others who played a part in popularising space technology and speculative fiction presented the universe of the future as an inhospitable, dystopian place, Le Guin applied her scientific approach to storytelling to the task of proposing ways of making it a better home for all living beings. 

We immediately recognise the silhouette of a deer. Its slender presence, seemingly ever-alert, constantly prepared for flight, is in the middle of the room. This version is presented in a matte, shiny aluminium shell. We take a second look and realise that something isn’t right. The animal’s body isn’t what it should be. It’s as though we were seeing some other, unfamiliar variety of the species. 

The avatar, or deer, has been created using an algorithm that’s been named Voronoi, after the Ukrainian mathematician Georgy Voronoy. It can be viewed as nature’s own algorithm, as its pattern can be easily recognised almost everywhere: in the landscape, and in the volumes of bodies. It has many applications in the various sciences, as its irregularities present a certain regularity that makes it suitable for speculations over the original shapes or structures of damaged or missing matter. Its ability to mimic the way nature organises itself in space also makes it useful for archaeologist and art historians, who may have no more than a fragment of a bone or a potential portrait of a Roman emperor to examine.

Perhaps, then, the deer we see before us is actually a proposal for a new variant of deer, a hybrid species? What the computer has created by following its instructions might not be so much wrong as ‘more’. An immediate reaction might be that this seems like an unnecessary, speculative experiment. But suppose all deer were to disappear from Earth? What then? There is no immediate danger of this happening today, but there are countless other species that do live on the brink of extinction. Scientists have proposed that our age is that of the sixth mass extinction, and have suggested we name it the Anthropocene. In fact, attempts to recreate extinct animals are already a reality.

talk of revolution/
politics/
/
bréé:p
beep.clĭck̆
ə˘clǎck̆
ə:

‘Do You Like Our Owl?’ This question is asked by the female cyborg Rachael in a key scene of the 1982 cult classic Bladerunner. She poses it to Deckard, a cyborg hunter. The owl that flies around freely inside the futuristic interior makes a deep impression on Deckard. ‘It’s artificial?’.

The owl in the half-hour animation Oracles, Owls... Some Animals Never Sleep (BR 2049) re-enacts this key scene, taking all the roles itself. The dialogue is blended with something that seems reminiscent of a coded message. Its speech is played back with crackly, glitchy audio, as though teleported through time and space. The voice moves back and forth between monotonous robot speech and the voices of Deckard and Rachael. Sometimes, we seem to hear the artist’s own voice, along with familiar and unfamiliar languages, or simply gibberish. Inside this cramped image space, the owl moves like a real owl one moment—bunching up its feathers, and staring blankly, as birds do —and suddenly appears incredibly present, with an urgent message to communicate in the next. The time is ripe for something: ‘Revolution!’

In his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, upon which Bladerunner is based, science fiction author Philip K. Dick (1928–82) presents a dying world in which all animals have gone extinct. The first of them to disappear from the planet was the owl. This nocturnal animal is the subject of many myths, and has represented wisdom—often in connection with female figures like Pallas Athena—or, in Arab and Indian cultures, been the symbol of female divinities that can access other worlds. The core of Dick’s ideas about the boundary between the human and the artificial doesn’t rely on some notion of
a ‘true’ origin. No, the term ‘human being’ applies ‘not to origin or to any ontology but to a way of being in the world.’*

The owl returns in Animoid. Here, it is an AI-generated picture, a way of producing images that densifies reality, filling it with information, while also opening it up by ejecting the viewer from any Renaissance notions of human autonomy and stewardship of the world. The truth isn’t given once and for all, but rather continuously produced anew, through a moving stream of constant, new questions. 

Ann Lislegaard isn’t the only artist who has explored how concepts like cyberspace, or the opportunities presented by mathematics and technology, can be used for art. What makes her art unique, apart from her ability to create enchanting visual worlds, is that she never settles for challenging the limits of the visual capacities of technology. Rather, she tells stories that connect us to one another through the wonder we share whenever faced with the beauty of life.  

The deer, the owl—and the spider in The Mind Is a Muscle. Let Ann Lislegaard whisk you away into her philosophical world! You’ll be given safe passage to a future that is perhaps unknown, but potentially brighter—if we so choose!

*Dick, Philip K. (1995). Sutin, Lawrence (ed.). The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. Vintage. p. 212.