Exhibition Proposal
Designed at Machine Poetics Lab at Cornell
Collaborate with Prof. Sang Leigh
2025 Summer
The booth here is a site of metabolic symbiosis. The exchange of CO₂, heartbeat, and flashing lights mimics the intrauterine interaction between fetus and mother, where the fetus’s physiology is regulated by atmospheric, hormonal, and metabolic signals from the mother’s body. The AI here talks to the unconscious body. Its interventions are not explicit, but critically invasive—forcing human unknowingly into metabolic reduction.
The booth invites people with a ring tone. They are prompted with reflective questions on the screen, such as “did you enjoy your work today.” The machine does not respond to a person with words, but with physiological feedback including light, sound, and vibration—that reprograms their stress response into relaxation. The AI does this by interpreting speech by the person, hence re-incubating them into low emission entities.
This installation explores a dystopian-utopian future of engineered quiet, where artificial systems work not to nurture human empowerment, but to reduce activity. The line between intimacy and control becomes blurred. By merging affective computing, climate politics, and technological domestication, Carbon Gestation invites visitors into a soft coercion—where they realize they are entangled in an ecological contract no one remembers signing.