Memo Akten’s All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (2021) takes its title from Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem, reimagining its vision for the age of AI. Created using custom software and advanced machine learning, and before consumer text-to-image image tools had been released, the short film reflects on our obsession and deification of technology. For Akten, the boundaries between “nature” and “artificial” are illusory; attempts to control one are attempts to control ourselves. Rejecting both blind submission and wholesale rejection, the work calls for a holistic entanglement of humanity, technology, and the natural world, continuing Akten’s research into meaningful human control over generative systems.

Memo Akten (b. 1975) is a multi-disciplinary artist and computer scientist creating Speculative Simulations and Data Dramatisations investigating the intricacies of human-machine entanglements; perception; consciousness; Cosmosapience; and the harmonies and tensions between technology & ecology, science & spirituality, modernity & ritual, self & collective intelligence. For more than a decade, he’s been working with Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and our Collective Consciousness as scraped by the Internet, to reflect on the human condition. Drawing connections between intelligence in machines, intelligence in nature, computer science, fundamental physics, biology, neuroscience and philosophy, his work is ultimately driven by a profound curiosity in the nature of reality, nature of life, and nature of the mind. He creates algorithmic and data driven moving images, sounds, and large-scale responsive installations and performances. He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths University of London in Artificial Intelligence, and he is Assistant Professor at University of California San Diego. Akten has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica (2013). His work has been widely exhibited and performed internationally at venues such as the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy.