Interactive soft robot developed in collaboration with research partner Roberto Alonso Trillo. Hydra constantly subjects its environment to audio surveillance, using the Demiurge deep learning raw audio synthesis system to learn how to make music from the audience with which it interacts. Hydra is currently on exhibit at Seed Gallery in Shenzhen. Previously they were on exhibit at MAIN (Italy) and at Osage (Hong Kong).

Three versions of Hydra have been made, a 2m long poly/silicone actuator series, a 4m long poly/silicone actuator series with a large dome, and a 6m long silicone-only soft actuator series (made specially for Seed in 2023), which sits on silicone pools.

Some comments on Hydra:

At the center of what we do is this concept of reproductive matter — that there exist these charged materials or systems or protocols that freely and uninhibitedly reproduce with everything around them. What we call AI is one aspect of reproductive matter, a membrane that synthesizes and incorporates characteristics from its ambient environment. An algorithm that gives structure to a platform like Spotify, or an ad-serving tool, or a generative transformer — these examples are situations wherein some reproduction occurs across the complex plane of the human or the material and the digital, the quantized, the computational. (I could make a note here that capitalism is yet another aspect of reproductive matter).

When it comes to these situations, you could arbitrarily position them as having humans on one side and computation on the other — humans reproducing themselves through, let’s say, deep learning models, as in a kind of transhumanist fantasy, into a digitized expression of assembled consciousness. But of course the entanglement is far more severe, as computation itself is bound to some relatively incoherent and very human assertions about the nature of truth and reality, and it is of course also very much bound to the material world — from rare earth minerals extraction, assembly, UX design, social reconsumption, and reciprocal effects on human bodies in many ways. In reality, this reproductive situation has been occurring for hundreds if not thousands of years, and is something far more mutual or endosymbiotic. What is significant about the present moment is the visibility or identifiability of this mode of exchange or co-construction, and of course the chorus of terror that has accompanied AI around precisely this question — what does it mean to consent to a kind of parasexual encounter with silicon? What does it mean to give collective social birth to computational inheritors that theoretically could exceed their semi-parents in scope and thought and capability? These things are rarely discussed in terms of reproductive ethics, but rather in the more mundane discourses of intellectual property, consumer data protection, and geopolitics.

Hydra takes its metaphorical basis in the small freshwater animal of the same name, which has a really interesting reproductive system — it can reproduce asexually, via budding, it can regenerate itself from cleaved bits, and it can also reproduce sexually. It has a series of tentacles that function as arms, but also as paddles, and indirectly as reproductive organs as well. Our Hydra sculpture sits aperch an environment of silicone pools, blowing air into silicone tentacles that slowly move themselves around those environments. Those tentacles are intended to elicit worms tilling soil, rice cakes representing nourishment, and phalluses spilling reproductive material. Their function is to draw in the external world and elicit audio feedback from its audience, which it then reproduces with freely and without pause.