Mikael Hwang

Vertex extends the inquiry into human and nonhuman intelligence, focusing on how technological mediation shapes and constrains perceptions of nonhuman agency. Rather than treating biological or artificial systems as passive instruments, we position our collaborators—one musical, featuring a "living" drum performed by bacteria, and one architectural, involving a generative AI that co-designed the pavilion—as active participants in our creative processes.

Mirroring previous works, Vertex integrates biology and spatial design, featuring a pavilion that enshrines a custom musical instrument translating bacterial activity into human-perceivable rhythms. Through this approach, we examine how human technologies limit our understanding of nonhuman intelligence and explore ways to enhance our comprehension by developing frameworks that incorporate nonhuman intelligence.

Thus, a key component of Vertex is a custom-built musical instrument designed to comprehend the bacterial performance from our earlier work Resonance, using human technological frameworks: a metal LP record, with the bacteria's activity quantized into sixteen concentric circles using Euclid's algorithm, is played back with three tonearms.

While this system facilitates the interpretation of bacterial activity through human technological means, it also emphasizes the inherent loss of fidelity in the translation process, highlighting the essence of Vertex: the challenge of preserving nonhuman intelligence when experienced through anthropocentric tools.

These limitations in comprehending the expressions of nonhuman agency are mirrored in the pavilion's hyper-grid form. Architecture has traditionally been constrained by the limitations of expressing space through quantized grids. However, with the guidance of generative AI, the pavilion envisions structures optimized for adaptability and spatial complexity, capable of joining any point in space to enable unfettered architectural expression. Beyond expanding the possibilities of architectural design by incorporating the intelligence of both human and nonhuman designers, the shift from a traditional grid to a hyper-grid spatially, and metaphorically, demonstrates the framework's enhanced ability to interpret nonhuman intelligence—such as bacterial data—into a format that is more accessible to humans, facilitated by multi-agent collaboration.