Networked Beings - Parameters and Parallels

How humans and animals perceive the world has fascinated both artists and researchers for long. However, despite this common interest, there is still only minimal interdisciplinary communication and exchange of concepts across these fields. In this project, Kristin Jakubek and Leon Brandt seek to use an art film and its immersive installation as rare and often missing catalyst for personal, crossdisciplinary academic communication and exchange between media-art and science. The wellresearched and scientifically informed video artwork by Kristin Jakubek and Leon Brandt gives an exemplary and valuable perspective on how today’s innovative fundamental research on animal behaviour and perception can be interpreted, presented, and disseminated in a new light outside of purely scientific/academic discourses. The filmmakers worked closely together with CASCB researchers Armin Bahl, Einat Couzin-Fuchs, and Hemal Naik.

About "Networked Beings - Parameters and Parallels"

The film sets out to make audiences think differently about what it means to be ‘intelligent’. The term, which is most commonly reserved for humans, has now also been assigned to machine learning algorithms. By looking at our biological co-species and positioning their ‘animal intelligence’ inside the framework of today’s most innovative and future-forming technology (AI), the artist - by creating an interpretation of intelligence by way of a speculative video-dataset – brings attention to the similarities and the differences between ‘biological ’and ‘artificial’. It is our understanding of both animals and machines, and how we, as humans, relate to them via the concept of ‘intelligence’, that is vitally and persistently important for future decision-making and sustainable thinking.

The video work is Kristin Jakubek's master thesis at Bauhaus University Weimar, in Media Art and Design. The video and spatial sound installation was displayed from 19.04. - 23.04. at the Altes Funkhaus Weimar.