Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

NON HUMAN is a film made from poems written in collaboration with an Artificial Intelligence (recurrent neural network) and five artists — York Chang, Marcus Civin, Tia-Simone Gardner, Viet Le, and Yvonne Rainer. Inspired by poet Muriel Rukeyser’s technique for writing The Book of the Dead (1937), a poem in which she directly quotes workers’ voices from congressional testimony about the Hawk’s Nest mining catastrophe that killed nearly 2000 miners, 80% of whom were Black workers. NON HUMAN was filmed in rural Vermont in disused marble, quarries, hospitals, and local artists’ studios and it presents leisure time and creative space as conditions to excavate the unwritten histories of labor, racism, and environmental destruction in local American communities. The generative AI used to write the script was trained with Rukeyser’s Collected Poems, the congressional testimony of workers that she quoted, and contemporary critical race and eco-feminist theories of Kathryn Yussof, Tavia Nyong’o, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers. In Hartman’s essay The Dead Book Revisited she asks “how do we attend to black death? How do we find life where only the traces of destruction remain?” NON HUMAN’s critical AI writing machine, fed by historic documentary materials, poetry that witnesses to extractive capitalism and anti-black racism, speculates on Hartman’s question. Live performers in NON HUMAN include: sound engineer Ben Arindell, singer/song-writer Patrick Sargent, physician Jeffrey Yucht, critic Marcus Civin, sculptor Fred X Brownstein, and sound technician Jack Schlandt.

David Kelley is an artist working in photography, video, and installation. His recent projects explore the impacts of global capitalism, resource extraction, and evolving landscapes, combining elements of experimental documentary, ethnography, and avant-garde cinema to offer a perspective that is both grounded and speculative. His work has been shown nationally and internationally at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Fotofest Biennial in Houston, Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, The Bank in Shanghai, and the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. Kelley holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and was a resident of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He is based in Los Angeles, where he is an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California.