![]() ![]() Samuel Butler’s imagined world of humans as affectionate machine-tickling aphids never really took off. By entering the spaces of the art gallery and locating ourselves in the place of others, sympathy read alongside machinic evolution suggests a new approach to the ecological disaster of species extinction. In looking back at Bergson and Butler through contemporary art, I suggest that the art gallery gives us a sympathetic space in which we can encounter the knowledges of Bergson and Darwin, temper them with the imaginings of Butler, and ground them with the transformative living machines created by Huyghe, Lislegaard, and Fowler. In very different ways Huyghe, Lislegaard, and Fowler use the art gallery to demonstrate how humans might sympathetically engage with ecological transformation, and thus the confronting possibility of our own extinction. Contemporary artists Pierre Huyghe, Ann Lislegaard, and Hayden Fowler use video and installation art to explore interspecies relationships in time and space. By interspersing a story of humans and machines with insect life, Butler pointed to a broad imaginative web of interspecies and machinic relationships. Samuel Butler took Bergson’s ideas to an absurd extent by mixing them with readings of Charles Darwin and claiming a vital impulse for machines. The final circle contains 3 pairs of chromosomes 2 blue, 2 red, and 2 purple, and 3 chromatids 1 blue, 1 red, and 1 purple.At the turn of the previous century Henri Bergson suggested that sympathy offered a way to understand interspecies relationships. From these 2 haploid and diploid circles there is an arrow from each that connects and points down to a final circle labeled Non-viable or infertile triploid plant, 3n. The tetraploid plant points to a circle labeled diploid egg/sperm, 2n and it contains 3 pairs of chromosomes 2 blue, 2 red, and 2 purple. The diploid plant points to a circle labeled haploid egg/sperm, n and it contains 1 red, 1 purple and 1 blue chromatid. ![]() From each circle there is an arrow pointing down to a new circle. The circle on the right is labeled 4n tetraploid plant and it contains 6 pairs of chromosomes two pairs are purple, two pairs are red, and two pairs are blue. The circle on the left is labeled Diploid plant, 2n and contains 3 pairs of chromosomes one pair is purple, one pair is red and one pair is blue. There are 2 circles at the top of the diagram. On the left side of the left side of the diagram, a line to an image labeled Anancus branches above the Gomphotherium, and a line above the Primelephas just before the Asian Elephant branches to an image labeled mammoth.Ī diagram showing how a triploid plant is formed. From Palaeomastodon there is a branch to the right that gives rise to 2 lines one to a Mastodon and the other to a Stegodon. Below the Primelephas there is a line with an image connecting it to a Gomphotherium, and then a line to the original species labeled Palaeomastodon. The Asian elephant and the African elephant are at the top of the diagram and have separate lines that connect in the center at an image labeled Primelephas. The diagram on the right is a branched tree depicting the speciation of the Asian and African elephants from a common ancestor. Six species have died out over evolutionary time, one species did not evolve at all, and the remaining 4 species evolved to result in 14 species. ![]() Across the top of horizontal line XIV are 15 species that are present at this evolutionary point. Extending from the letters are multiple small dotted lines with various small branches on the numbered horizontal lines to create a tree-like pattern. Below the bottom line are letters representing the origin of 11 species written from left to right A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L. The diagram has 15 parallel horizontal lines numbered with roman numerals from top to bottom XIV, XIII, XII, XI, X, IX, VIII, VII, VI, V, IV, III, II, I representing levels of evolution. The diagram on the left is a replication of Darwin’s original representation of an evolutionary tree.
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