Dates: 12 September -21 October 2026
Times: 9am – 4pm, daily
Entry: FREE
Venue: CCC
Public Program: to be announced
“How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day?“, Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872)
Are we “natural” lifeforms? Do we “care” if something is “naturally” alive? Or is the performance of “a/liveness” enough? Is “care” something only living things can provide or perceive? And – an even stranger question – is “care” something only living things need, or deserve?
This experimental work blurs the lines of human and non-human beings. It is a collaboration between the artist, plants, robots, AI and you – with all of “us” actors and audience to these strange times, and the entanglements of living and semi-living entities.
Inside the exhibition you will see the artist’s ongoing arguably futile attempts to teach an AI-robotic system to care for plants. Live and time-lapse video records the labour-intensive process, surrounded by natural and machinic soundscapes. The work poses the question: is the artist enslaved by the very system they are creating to automate their labour of “care”?
Inspired by Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) – a satirical and prescient take on Darwinism, sentience and machine ‘reproduction’ – it explores bio(il)logical machines and their un/natural selection.
In 2026, this reads less like satire. AI-risk theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky makes the opposite case to Butler’s: that artificial intelligence is not natural at all – not selected by any environment, not shaped by survival or descent. It is optimised. And yet, it is hard not to feel something like sentience as we form ever more intimate and reliant relationships with chatbot large language models.
These “Platform AI” organisms – large corporate consciousness, with perhaps questionable consciences – seem both less and more human than we would like, forcing us to re-anthropomorphise ourselves.
Matt Gingold is a transdisciplinary artist weaving together art, science and critical theory. His research focuses on creating intimate and revealing experiences of – and with – technology. Often fusing installation and performance, his artworks experiment with the uncertain boundaries of synthetic sentience, alien intelligence, machine being/s, and the ever-increasing automation of life.
He is primarily concerned with the collective, emotional and enchanted relationships “we” share with technology, and how these interact with the oft-hidden history of science as (and of) labour surveillance and cognitive control. Most recently, this has clustered around investigations into automata, neuroscience, computer vision and machine listening.
His work has been commissioned and presented widely, including at Ars Electronica (AT), Tokyo Biennial (JP), Club Transmediale (DE), ANTI Festival (FL), Seoul Festival (KR); and in Australia, at Now or Never, MONO/FOMA, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, the National Portrait Gallery of Australia and Melbourne Museum.
Visit the artist’s webiste here.
Image credit: Matt Gingold (detail)