dam.nation [in-development]

created by Marcos Krivocapich, Milton Lim, Patrick Blenkarn

Project description:

In 1946, the Argentine government imported 20 Canadian beavers (consisting of 10 pairs of beaver mates). The humans’ intent was to create a viable fur trade out of the southern Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego. Instead, the humans created a major invasive species issue: the beaver has no predators so far south and beaver pelts weren’t nearly as lucrative as the government economic advisors thought. Today there are hundreds of thousands of beavers in Tierra del Fuego—nearly one for every resident. In the decades since their ‘invasion’, the beavers have caused widespread ecology problems, changed natural waterways, and altered both the landscape and biosphere.

In dam.nation, we’re using this historical human blunder as a starting point to create a new work. Through an international collaboration between Canadian and Argentine artists, dam.nation is a multilingual machine-based performance that explores parallels between human-animal and human-machine relations, taking into consideration invasive technology, animatronics, and interactive media.

On digital technology and animal life:

Fears about large and small scale artificial intelligence systems are igniting labour strikes and heated debates across multiple industries. As we collectively negotiate new human-machine relations, we’re asking what is a permissible amount of invasion? What thresholds, both real and imaginary, are we using to determine and frame the threat? What can we learn from Argentina’s belated dreams of a fur trade? What strategies can we glean from this historical moment towards more equitable and just practices between human, machine, and animal lives? And, what impacts will machine actors have on narrative, interactivity, and human social experiences when they are incorporated into live performance contexts?

Beavers have an important role in growing robotics theory. In 2018, a research paper from the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences detailed the study of autonomous rovers and stimergy: a biological phenomenon of indirect coordination wherein beavers take cues from their surroundings and build dams through responsive patchwork, rather than by blueprint. This research greatly contributed to the last seven years of robotics development orienting towards use in search-and-rescue operations and planetary exploration for Mars rover-style vehicles. These existing parallels between animal life and robots allow us to consider and create with different layers of participant/robot agency.

Created with support from Canada Council for the Arts.