Syncretic animacy

In all likelihood… we will be surrounded by animate objects in the future. A considerable part of how the near future will look and feel is being decided now by big corporations and upcoming scientific-economical paradigms such as mortal computing (Hinton 2022). Whatever one’s economic stance, developments this impactful shouldn’t be left to capitalistic forces alone, and artists and researchers should be able to explore them too. Our exploration of animate objects and their impact on their environment is in the Neo Seer research series. We ask: are we capable of authentic interactions with animate artwork that can think and watch back?

This question is posed physically. People visiting the installation can actually experience being in front of an opinionated animate object, which, like a confrontation with a visitor from an imagined future, may reflect back a glimpse of who we are and where we might be heading. As a speculative work of art (Dunne and Raby 2013), it doesn’t give us an answer; rather, it embodies an experience where we’re offered the possibility of encountering instead of theorizing, an encounter of which the theoretical mind ultimately knows nothing, and an AI even less so.¹

As Blythe (2023) observes, AI can produce text in the style of meaning, but it lacks the lived experience that imbues true insight. By having a machine output musings about the world in front of it, we can highlight both the incredible ingenuity and the devastating emptiness of it all. We even simulate the lived experience by giving vision and memory to these objects, but does that make it more authentic?²

Indeed, syncretic animacy means that the lifelikeness we witness in Neo Seers seems to degenerate to nothing more than a carefully constructed illusion, designed to draw us nearer in. If we break the spell, the illusion falls apart into a mass of almost random constituents: digital fabrication techniques, worldbuilding, character storytelling, NPC theory, computer vision and AI. Syncretic animacy resembles how online communities can evolve elaborate belief systems or conspiracy theories by combining disparate sources, memes, and misinformation (Callaghan and Liedgren 2024); these are syncretic worldviews without a unifying tradition, often convincing but fundamentally fragmented. And they have a similar binding spell.

In much the same way, the interactive objects in the series almost act like RPG characters, and us, viewers, become players. The installation extends the “magic circle” of play into the art exhibition (Huizinga 1955): the game is played in a small perceptual ecosystem. There is the human viewer and the animate object and the feedback loop of looks and responses between them. Each influences the other’s experience: the person’s movements and expressions become data for the machine, and the machine’s outputs (its “thoughts”, a running commentary on the situation) become stimuli for the person’s emotions and interpretations. Within this system, a form of intersubjectivity emerges – a sense that two consciousnesses are meeting, even though one of them is only the promise of a spell.

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