2024, single-channel digital video with sound, 40 sec.
Dem Bones brings together archaeology, scientific reconstruction and generative AI to stage an encounter with a distant ancestor. Wilma, a Neanderthal reconstructed from the remaining bones of several neanderthal specimins, addresses the viewer directly. Speaking from deep time, she collapses thousands of years into a single conversation, reminding us that today's technologies are built upon the labour, discoveries and imagination of generations we will never meet.
The work opens with Dem Bones, the nineteenth-century spiritual inspired by the biblical vision in Ezekiel of dry bones returning to life. The song carries an unexpected resonance. It echoes Wilma's own reconstruction from scattered skeletal remains, recalls the earliest bone tools that marked the emergence of human technology, and anticipates her reanimation through generative AI. Bones become body; artefacts become voice.
Wilma herself occupies an uncertain space between museum display and living presence. Based on scientific evidence yet animated through artificial intelligence, she never fully escapes either condition.
Adopting the familiar language of the contemporary creator's talking-head video, her direct gaze establishes the intimacy of a face-to-face encounter confronting us with our material past.
Her hesitant movements, imperfect synchronisation and uncanny expression resist the seamless realism often associated with digital media. Rather than concealing the process of reconstruction, the work allows it to remain visible.
The video was made during the first wave of publicly available generative AI, when speculation, optimism and anxiety surrounded the technology. Narratives of inevitable progress sat alongside calls for caution, while others questioned whether these systems should exist at all. Dem Bones introduces a voice from much further back in history.
Faced with another technological turning point, our ancestor offers a message that is at once candid and prophetic. She speaks neither with certainty nor authority, but with the perspective of deep time, reminding us that every generation inherits a world it did not build and leaves one it will never see.
Dem Bones
2024, single-channel digital video with sound, 40 sec.
Dem Bones brings together archaeology, scientific reconstruction and generative AI to stage an encounter with a distant ancestor. Wilma, a Neanderthal reconstructed from the remaining bones of several neanderthal specimins, addresses the viewer directly. Speaking from deep time, she collapses thousands of years into a single conversation, reminding us that today's technologies are built upon the labour, discoveries and imagination of generations we will never meet.
The work opens with Dem Bones, the nineteenth-century spiritual inspired by the biblical vision in Ezekiel of dry bones returning to life. The song carries an unexpected resonance. It echoes Wilma's own reconstruction from scattered skeletal remains, recalls the earliest bone tools that marked the emergence of human technology, and anticipates her reanimation through generative AI. Bones become body; artefacts become voice.
Wilma herself occupies an uncertain space between museum display and living presence. Based on scientific evidence yet animated through artificial intelligence, she never fully escapes either condition.
Adopting the familiar language of the contemporary creator's talking-head video, her direct gaze establishes the intimacy of a face-to-face encounter confronting us with our material past.
Her hesitant movements, imperfect synchronisation and uncanny expression resist the seamless realism often associated with digital media. Rather than concealing the process of reconstruction, the work allows it to remain visible.
The video was made during the first wave of publicly available generative AI, when speculation, optimism and anxiety surrounded the technology. Narratives of inevitable progress sat alongside calls for caution, while others questioned whether these systems should exist at all. Dem Bones introduces a voice from much further back in history.
Faced with another technological turning point, our ancestor offers a message that is at once candid and prophetic. She speaks neither with certainty nor authority, but with the perspective of deep time, reminding us that every generation inherits a world it did not build and leaves one it will never see.