Like the universe, the visual and scientific wonders of the American Museum of Natural History continues to expand. The multitude of artificial life, autonomous agents, and on-chain gewgaws continues to expand. “Artificial & Autonomous: Consciousness Debated In-Situ”, curated by Edgar R. Ziade, rivals the repetitious Conway simulation that has been on view near the coat check for several years now. That piece, controversial more for the debates on what is and is not ‘life’ than its exhibition value, is still available to those who can conjure it into view from its storage block on-chain. But the new collection features have more crowd-pleasing awe-inspiring value than the historical, yet somewhat flat, Conway original.
The museum reimagined its LVMH Bionomics Hall in collaboration with LLMs from the Santa Fe Institute, Cornell University, University of California Santa Cruz, and Oxford University. The results weave through the past, present, and possible futures of automata and artificialia, including the NPCs that most adults will recall from the Fortnite and CoD of their youth, through to the self-correcting autodidact alibi agents that most visitors carry with them, and into the prototypes being designed and studied in the Museum’s expansive Speculative Futures R&D Facility.
The museum’s newest construction is the formidable Haraway Center, located adjacent to the aging North American Mammal Hall. Vibrant, multidimensional curvilinear architectural faceting, interlinked with a sunken sunlit foyer, it evokes multitudes of forms. Approaching from the entrance, one is guided into the space almost imperceptibly and once within the main atrium, the feeling of connectedness within an infinite world of ways and kinds of life feels, well — intimate. I didn’t feel lost or diminished within the many, but rather a deep interlink and sense of participation rather than isolation. The giant staircase leading upward to the far-away second floor, and downward to the Speculative Futures R&D workshops also serves as benches, and plenty of visitors found it served as a place to contemplate, meet, and quietly study.