Installation 

   At the core of this piece stands a mesmerizing vegetal wall that undergoes a profound metamorphosis - a journey from organic lushness to manufacturable innovation to digital precision. Can you even tell the difference? Amidst this captivating progression, a frozen irony unfolds - « how to take care of an artificial plant? ». Drawing inspiration from Max Tegmark’s, researcher at MIT, we are guided into a brave new world of innovation and intelligence. His words resonate, inviting  us to confront more in depth the question of what it means to nurture and grow when traditional boundaries are redefined. « Things you cannot grow » invites us to reflect on the essence of growth, and the choices that will shape our relationship with both nature and the ever-evolving realm of technology.

“- We’re going to give birth to an intelligent alien civilisation, unlike anything that human, that evolution here on earth was able to create in terms of the path, the biological path it took. 

- Yeah, and it’s gonna be much more alien than a cat, or even the most exotic animal on the planet right now, because it will not have been created through the usual Darwinian competition where it necessarily cares about self-preservation, that is afraid of death, any of those things. The space of alien minds you can build is just so much faster than what evolution will give you. […] 

- The entirety of human written history has been through poetry, through novels, been trying to describe through philosophy, trying to describe the human condition and what’s entailed in it. Like you said, fear of death and all those kinds of things, what is love… and all of that changes if you have a different kind of intelligence. Like all of it, the entirety of all those poems, they’re trying to sneak up to what the hell it means to be human. All of that changes. How AI concerns and existential crises that AI experiences, how that clashes with the human existential crisis, the human condition. That’s hard to fathom, hard to predict. […] 

- Maybe the struggle that it’s actually hard to do things is part of the things that give us meaning as well, right ? So for example, I found it so shocking that this new Microsoft GPT-4 commercial that they put together has this woman talking about…showing this demo how she’s going to give a graduation speech to her beloved daughter and she asks GPT-4 to write it. It was frigging 200 words or so. If I realised that my parents couldn’t be bothered just struggling a little bit to write 200 words, and outsource that to their computer, I would feel really offended actually. I want to constantly work on myself to become a better person. If I say something in anger that I regret, I want to go back and really work on myself rather than just tell an AI to always filter what I write so I don’t have to work on myself, cause then I’m not growing. ” 

(Reference. Max Tegmark:The Case for Halting AI Development | Lex Fridman Podcast. Youtube)

Photos and videos captured by Priya Mu in collaboration with William P Guzman and Alyssa Castillo Yap