Extinct Species Are Honored in a New York Art Show

When K Aldo-McDowell imagines that you immerse yourself in the exhibition “The Knowledge Lost”, the vision develops something like this: it is a hot and agitated day in New York City, and you slide to the serene gallery that amphlans the show.

You see another visitor, standing on a podium with a microphone, surrounded by funds that represent stone commemorative monuments. The visitor sings scientific names of species about an infused musical score with fluid water sounds and crepitant ice. While listening, Latin words are washed as meditative mantras: Zuberia Zuberi” Tasmaniosaurus triassicus, Vegaranina Precocia.

The visitor occurs aside. You approach the stage yourself and see that it is stacked with six books printed with the names of the species. While you sing and say the names, you are surprised by the magnitude of life. You would need days to honor all these past relatives: trilobites, Tyrannosaurus rex, mosses the size of a tree, our ancestors of Jurassic mammals and numerous other life forms lost for a long time.

“The strategy here is to start thinking with the deep time to expand our sense of ancestry, but also our sense of future,” said Aldo-McDowell in a California video interview, referring to the history of the 4.5 billion years of the Earth.

“The known Lost”, shown at the Swiss Institute from May 7 to September 7, is the first individual exposure of Aldo-McDowell, 47, artist, writer and musician who uses them/they pronouns. It serves as a space for visitors, as the artist says, the law of “rehearsing” a continuous development opera, which Aldo-McDowell hopes that it will be carried out in a proposed monument. The idea is that both the opera and the monument pay tribute to the species that have been extinguished.

The idea evolved from the previous innovative works of Aldo-McDowell, theme of nature. In the Pandemia Apogee, Aldo-McDowell wrote “Pharmakoi”, the first co-author book with the GPT-3-A Generation of text intelligence program AI developed by OpenAI, the company that launched chatgpt.

Through written exchanges, Aldo-McDowell and GPT-3 reflected on loss of species, plant intelligence and other issues. In 2022 at the Lincoln Center, Aldo-McDowell foreseen “Song of the Ambassador”, an opera of progress work that co-writes with GPT-3 in which the singers represent the sun, space and life.

For opera, “the concept we started with was the healing of sound in a collective environment,” said Aldo-McDowell. In “The Known Lost”, the healing element of sound is more participatory, and the objective is to collectively heal our relationship with extinction.

Aldo-McDowell, a nature lover, regularly visits the Amazon jungle and lives in the mountains of southern California, near an area decimated by recent forest fires. They said that, in the midst of serious threats to these and other regions, “it has been very difficult for them to think about anything, loss and extinction of biodiversity.”

They continued: “So I thought about facing that head, instead of trying to find some way to avoid thinking about it.”

During the few years, Alison Coplan, head curator of the Swiss Institute, has been thinking about ways to fulfill the mission of the organization to address climate change through art. Intrigued by the opera and the book of Aldo-McDowell, he communicated with the theme that presents an experimental show that would generate reflection and dialogue on environmental issues.

In a New York video interview, Coplan said: “When you face the reality of our world today, in terms of climate change, it can be easily rejected and feel paralyzed.”

“K made this exhibition to take into account a way we can start focusing our energy and advance,” he added.

Aldo-McDowell began the process feeling dissociated from extinction, they said. Then they sought paleobiology databases for all animals, plants, fungi and other beings that have disappeared the life of sprinkling on Earth approximately 4 billion years ago. They occurred to them a list of 180,285 identified species. This is just a fraction of the true and unknown number. Scientists estimate that about 99 percent of the approximately 5 to 50 billion species that existed are extinct.

Aldo-McDowell said that, personally, the humble realized that we know how little it was “extremely liberating.” They added: “Touch what we do not know how to open a possible way to relate to the world that allows us not to be the center of the universe.”

Aldo-McDowell created images generated by the stone monuments recorded with this list of species that will hang like theater curtains around the exhibition space. The list also forms the opera libretto that visitors will sing or read of the six books near the stage, which represents what many believe is the six mass extinctions of the Earth.

Initially, Aldo-McDowell said they felt “fearful lazy” and “intense emotions” on devastating theses. The first five mass extinctions were triggered by Cataclysms such as super volcano rashes and the impact of a massive asteroid. Today, humans drive around 1 million plant and animal species to extinction, according to a United Nations report. Many scientists call it the sixth mass extinction.

But while the artist participated in deep time thinking, they realized that extinction was not always sad. In the past, a natural process that prepares the scenario for dynamic evolution bursts has a leg. The fact that life has repeatedly recovered from the edge of obliteration, such as the extinction of the Permian that eliminated 90 percent of the planet’s species, is impressive. And the absence of T. Rex certainly makes the world modern a more pleasant place. As a result, Aldo-McDowell said: “I have the big tasks that make this work not something that feels really sad.”

The funds generated by the AI, rendered in edifying colors such as sky blue and yellow ocher, portray a commemorative complex of hidden in imposing mountains next to a placid lake. In the images, the monuments recorded with the names of the species are raised as cannon walls on small, almost insignificant humans.

Aldo-McDowell said the scenes were inspired by abandoned Italian marble quarries, where, for centuries, white stone slabs of the mountain lists have been cut. The artist imagined carving a monument directly in one of these extraction sites, poetically illustrating renewal after humans driven.

The artist hopes to build a real stone monument to extinction, thought that the location and details have not yet determined the legs. However, Coplan said: “The idea of ​​the essay is that we are all beginning to perform this text, and in doing so, we are beginning to make the monument, because now it is in all our minds.”

Also in development is act 2 of “The known lost”, in which the species will be added to the monument as they disappear from the earth, after the exposure ends at the Swiss Institute. Aldo-McDowell said these additions could be done ceremonially and transmit to raise awareness “while a deeply felt and significant ritual.”

For Aldo-McDowell, creating this exhibition has been “a process of healing” that led them from the dissociation and fear of a state of informed humility. They realized that contemplating the role of humans in a narrative of deep time gives us an option.

“You could see it in a passive or nihilistic way, that it doesn’t matter what you do because time is so long,” they said. “Or I could see that you are part of a cumulative process, and everything you really matter.”