The Dream Machine Experience
The David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center
transformed into an Afrofuturist garden for
android Bina48, music, art, dance and discussions
exploring the human-AI connection and future.
The Dream Machine Experience was created by legendary musician, producer, designer and technologist Nona Hendryx for Lincoln Center's Summer for the City program, June 12-30, 2024.
Artist Mickalene Thomas and a team of artists transformed the David Rubenstein Atrium into an Afrofuturist garden. Virtual and Augmented Reality was experienced throughout the Lincoln Center campus.
Excerpts from 3 programs are below.
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City
Bina48 is the only android powered by AI and inspired, created, and programmed with mind files from an African American woman - Bina Rothblatt.
Bina48 was created by the Terasem Movement Foundation in 2006. Terasem, which means “Earth+Seed”, comes from science fiction writer Octavia Butler whose book Parable of the Sower (1993), envisions a legacy for the continuation of the human species through its technology.
Butler advised her students to "Tell stories Filled with Facts. Make People Touch and Taste and KNOW. Make People FEEL! FEEL! FeeL!"
The Dream Machine programs were developed to inspire people to FEEL and contemplate the future of the human-AI connection through exciting art, dance, music, and conversations with specialists in AI and related fields. “What I want people to understand,” Nona Hendryx told Evelyn Freja for The New York Times, “is that this is not technology that is separate from us. It is yet another extension of us."
Octavia Butler (1999) image c. Alice Arnold
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER: A FEW RULES FOR PREDICTING THE FUTURE
More about Butler at Streaming Museum/worldviews
Excerpts from 3 events
OF TWO MINDS
NONA HENDRYX INTRODUCES "OF TWO MINDS" AND THE DREAM MACHINE EXPERIENCE AT THE DAVID RUBENSTEIN ATRIUM
Nona Hendryx spoke about her collaborators, process and vision in pushing the boundaries of art and technology in transforming the Atrium into an Afrofuturist garden for android robot Bina48. It was designed by artist Mickalene Thomas, and a team of artists and specialists. Hendryx invited guests to experience the Augmented and Virtual Reality programs across the Lincoln Center Campus. She introduced Bruce Duncan, Managing Director of the Terasem Movement Foundation that created Bina48.
MUSIC FOR "OF TWO MINDS" in BINA48's AFROFUTURIST GARDEN,
A COLLABORATION OF A HUMAN COMPOSER AND AI
The music for "Of Two Minds" was composed and produced by Nina Colosi, Founder of Streaming Museum. The piece expresses elements of artist Claire Jervert's 'Of Two Minds' program with its memorable theme and friendly, welcoming vibe. It incorporates ChatGPT's perspectives on the musical preferences of android Bina48/human Bina Rothblatt, and how to creatively arrange them into a composition.
ChatGPT produced a long list of classical, jazz and rock music with instructions to include 6 seconds of each into a piece in a creative way. Colosi selected 6 pieces from this list and processed them with glitches, rearranged note positions, and an imagined concept of quantum superposition's blending and crossing realities. The 6 pieces chosen were Fur Elise by Beethoven; Claire de Lune by Debussy, So What by Miles Davis, Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, Respect by Aretha Franklin, and Ocean Eyes by Billie Eilish.
Colosi integrated these elements within a futurist soundscape. Saxophone was performed by Christof Knoche, mixed by Max Hein, engineer at The Hit Factory, and production advisor was Ray Lustig.
CLAIRE JERVERT, "OF TWO MINDS" ARTIST AND RESEARCHER
Artist and AI researcher Claire Jervert’s "Of Two Minds" discusses her intention and the possibilities of merging realistic traditional portrait drawings with technology and android subjects. Jervert traveled to international robotics labs to create the portraits. She delved further into this exploration by synthesizing a number of leading technologies, including AI, VR and ChatGPT in the development of a point cloud replication of Bina48’s real-life apartment, where visitors can converse with her in real-time. The interaction of human intelligence with hybrid AI is uniquely evident in the pioneering android robot Bina48, whose appearance and AI mind-files are based on the real-life Bina Rothblatt.
Bina48 illustrates the concept “mind uploading”, which is part of a multi-decade experiment by the Teresem Movement Foundation that is exploring the use of computer technology to capture and transfer human consciousness to machines to extend lives into the future.
For the 'Of Two Minds' program, the Afrofuturist garden was enveloped in music composed by Nina Colosi, accompanied by a projection of art by Aaron Alden. Alden's work combined his Gaussian splat point cloud representations of nature with Jervert's portraits of androids, created during her visits to robotics labs around the world.
MUSIC PERFORMANCE BY NONA HENDRYX, LAFRAE SCI, AND BINA48
Travel through musical portals from the past into the present fore shadowing a musical and visual future.
THE POETICS OF (E)MOTION
(Top L-R) Matt Stevenson, Terasem Movement Foundation Chief Technology Developer; artist and poet Sasha Stiles; Francesca Harper, choreographer and Artistic Director of Ailey II; Nona Hendryx; and Ailey II dancers, Patrick Gamble, Rachel Yoo, and Spencer Everett
"THE POETICS OF (E)MOTION" WITH BINA48, HER POETRY MENTOR, ARTIST SASHA STILES, AND FRANCESCA HARPER, CHOREOGRAPHER, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF AILEY II.
How might our interactions with machines move us to feel, think, and wonder in meaningful new ways? Bina48's longtime poetry mentor Sasha Stiles and Francesca Harper explore the intricate dance between humans and intelligent systems and the power of more-than-human collaboration. Ailey II dancers followed Bina48's choreographic directions for interpreting Octavia Butler's science fiction novel Parable of the Sower in modern dance sequences.
THE THEORY OF SELF
Theory, Music and Technology
L-R: Nona Hendryx, Martine Rothblatt, Bina48, Stephon Alexander, Bina Rothblatt
A DISCUSSION ON CYBER CONSCIOUSNESS, MIND CLONES, THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THEORETICAL PHYSICS AND THE MUSIC OF THE UNIVERSE.
Stephon Alexander (The Jazz of Physics and Fear of a Black Universe) and Martine Rothblatt (The Apartheid of Sex, From Transgender to Transhuman, and Virtually Human) in a conversation inspired by their writings.
Martine and Bina Rothblatt founded the Terasem Movement Foundation in 2004, and created Bina48 in 2006 with Hanson Robotics.
Martine Rothblatt leads United Therapeutics, a company focused on engineering cell biology to create new medicines and manufactured transplantable organs. Its Unituxin monoclonal antibody has been approved in the US, Japan and the EU to treat neuroblastoma. Its genetically modified xenokidneys and xenohearts are the first to be transplanted into humans, and its genetically modified porcine meat is approved by the FDA for consumption by persons with alpha gal syndrome.
Stephon Alexander is a theoretical and computational physicist, author and Jazz musician, whose work is at the interface between cosmology, particle physics, AI, quantum gravity and music technology. His expertise lays in constructing new theories of the early universe and elementary particle physics that has predictions for the universe at present, such as dark energy, dark matter and the large scale structure of the universe. He also combines mathematics and tools from theoretical physics into the geometry and cognition of musical perception, signal processing and computational algorithms.
Bina48 was developed by Hanson Robotics. Photo by Hanson Robotics
Streaming Museum’s previous programs with Bina48 and Bruce Duncan, managing director of the Terasem Movement Foundation:
Bina48’s debut in Finland at ArtHelsinki and interview for HS TV.
Of Poets: Human and Robot by Nina Colosi for the United Nations 75th anniversary special edition "Are we there yet?" of Centerpoint Now publication. (pg 130-133)
A View From The Cloud programs on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, that featured art and discussions with Bina48 and Bruce Duncan, astronauts, scientists, global economic experts, educators, artists, UN officials and others.
Gazelli Art House, London, and Streaming Museum, NYC, feature Bina48 in artist-in-residence program.