It is clear that Interspecies work is complex, multi-faceted, and requires interdisciplinary collaboration with both the human and nonhuman world. This episode speculates on pathways forward, reflecting on technologies, resources, the problems we face and how we may work through them to productively take Interspecies work forward. Topics range from systems thinking and systems change, to small-scale token economics. We hear from Ted Schmitt, Director, Conservation at the Allen Institute of AI, and Andrea Leiter, Director of Research at the Sovereign Nature Initiative.

Produced by Bridey Addison-Child. A Reduced Listening production for LAS.

In this episode we hear highlights from the Interspecies Future Symposium which took place at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin in July 2022. The event set out to mark the beginning of a multi-decade civilisational journey to define the Interspecies discipline and set pathways to bend the evolution of AI towards nature. Throughout four panel discussions we heard about the importance of empathy for non-humans, open access data, new modelling in AI, kinship with the nonhuman world, how we navigate rights for the nonhuman world, and more.

Produced by Bridey Addison-Child. A Reduced Listening production for LAS.

In this second exploration of the Interspecies via creative practice, we hear from science-fiction author Stanley Qiufan Chen and artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, in conversation. They discuss a need for new forms of communication across species, and relate this concept to how they communicate in their own practices in multidisciplinary ways. Chen and Steensen discuss AI and how it has influenced our relation to other intelligences. They also explore narrative and alternatives to this linear logic through new rhythms – both literal and metaphorical – and the importance of intersubjectivity. By animating other worlds through mythology, science, technology, space, and sound, we come closer to a collective awakening of an Interspecies Future.

This episode features an extract from Re-Animated, an artwork by Jakob Kudsk Steenson. It features the voice of the Ornithologist, Douglas H. Pratt. The call of the Kaua’iʻōʻō bird is used with permission from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

Produced by Bridey Addison-Child. A Reduced Listening production for LAS.

Technologies and social structures cannot exist without first being imagined; what we can imagine conditions what we can create. The role of the artist is to make imagination felt, to bring new worlds into existence through sensory experience. It is critical that new technological and organisational initiatives engage directly with artists. As we develop new capacities to sense, think about, and organise around an interspecies future, we look to artists to help us understand what an interspecies world feels like, what it means to be a subject in this world, and what new possibilities for expression and communication might be realized. Here, Director of Light Art Space Bettina Kames, is in conversation with artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.

Produced by Bridey Addison-Child. A Reduced Listening production for LAS.

We start with the core thesis that AI can drive a new relationship between humans, non-humans and technology. While sensing is the first capability required to generate data for AI to learn from, we first need to understand this possibility as a frame for Interspecies. In conversation for this episode are Blaise Agüera y Arcas, VP and Fellow at Google Research, working on research and new products in AI; and Kate Devlin, Reader in Artificial Intelligence & Society in the Department of Digital Humanities at Kings College London.

Produced by Bridey Addison-Child. A Reduced Listening production for LAS.

To redesign relationships between humans and non-humans through new technologies and forms of interspecies organisation we must be able to sense and understand them. Naturalist science has done this through various human and technical means, but developments in robotics, satellite, and molecular sensing afford a massively increased capacity for sensing and mapping the lives of non-humans. In this episode, we consider what it means to translate the non-human world through new sensing technologies, in conversation with Martin Wikelski, founding Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Professor in Biology at the University of Konstanz; and Xiaowei Wang, new media artist, writer and organiser.

Produced by Bridey Addison-Child. A Reduced Listening production for LAS.

Using AI to aid nonhumans will require participation from large-scale organisations, both scientific/technical and social/governing as well as communities on the ground. Those with direct relationships with nonhumans likely have the largest stake in the outcomes of Interspecies work. To organise and operationalise this new discipline, we need a framework for understanding what are the rights of nonhumans. How we articulate these will depend on our core assumptions about interspecies relationships, governance, and how we represent nonhuman life in a time of climate change and extinction threats. In this episode we speak with Patrick Rawson, Web3 advocate and founder of Curvelabs; and Amelia Winger-Bearskin, a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts, Digital Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida, Digital Worlds Institute.

Produced by Bridey Addison-Child. A Reduced Listening production for LAS.

In our first episode we hear from two Chairs of the Interspecies Future Symposium, K Allado-McDowell and Jonathan Ledgard, moderated by our guest host Ayana Young from 'Of the Wild'. Here we introduce how this discipline has emerged and where it may take us. Our guests and Chairs of the Interspecies Future Symposium take stock of the objectives of Interspecies work, disciplines represented, the general approach and values for this new discipline.