"This work is about language, desire and surveillance."
As with training an AI to think like a human, Bundjulung and Ngāpuhi artist Amrita Hepi uses the 1960s 'dolphin house' experiment to examine the imposed hierarchy of intelligences and the ethics of forcing knowledge onto others. In this experiment, scientists funded by NASA attempted to teach dolphins human language in the hope that it would help them learn how to communicate with extraterrestrial life.
Scripture for a smoke screen: Episode 1 – dolphin house (2022), commissioned by ACMI and SAMSTAG, University of South Australia, collates ephemera connected to NASA’s study with new footage of Hepi dancing and communicating with an inflatable dolphin. Working predominantly as a dancer and choreographer, Hepi investigates what happens when we are constantly under surveillance, and when the images and stories presented to the world about us come from the gaze of someone else. The work asks, who is deemed intelligent and what are the metrics through which intelligence is measured? Western knowledge systems, including science and language, place themselves at the top of the food chain – but there are many complex knowledge systems in societies, human and otherwise, outside of that.
There is a comedic and absurd element to Hepi’s work, just as there is to the original experiment, which was ultimately deemed a failure. Can we trust what we see is real? We must leave room for misinterpretation and mistranslation when we are not getting information directly from the source, when the source is corrupted, and when the systems of value and knowledge come from an outside place.
– Curator ACMI Kate ten Buuren
