Neural-Lithic Harvests | Hannah Newman

In a world where machines become more like humans, and humans become more like machines, what does it mean to be alive? From self-help and romantic chatbots, content generation, productivity boosters, population surveillance and more, artificial intelligence has entangled itself in every corner of life. While AI offers new pathways into the future, it also poses risks to human agency, authorship, privacy, and equity, and accelerates climate change through its growing energy demands.

In Neural-Lithic Harvests, the evolving relationship between humans, nature, and artificial intelligence takes root in a shifting terrain of sculpture, paintings, poetry, and sound. Drawing on metaphors from ecology and agriculture, the exhibition asks: what fruit will we harvest from our relationship with AI and just who is the farmer, and who is being farmed?

Throughout the exhibition, AI-generated imagery and hand-built sculptures co-exist, probing the tension between human agency and machine creation. Anchoring the exhibition, a soundscape composed from human-written texts loops through the space, narrated by an AI voice that lends its own inflections to the words. Sculptures and paintings incorporate silicon rocks, wires, circuit boards, and surveillance cameras intermingled with organic materials, blurring the boundary between digital and natural, living and non-living, while grounding the work in the material realities of connected technologies.

As we chase productivity, optimization, entertainment, and endless progress, Neural Lithic Harvests questions what we are cultivating––and to what end? What unknown harvests await us in the data fields?

This exhibition was made possible by generous support from the Regional Arts and Culture Council.

All events are free and open to the public.

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