The Post-bit Human Universe: An Experiment on the Evolutionary History of Human-Posthuman Relations

This paper outlines the authors' most recent artistic experimentation on the evolutionary history of human-posthuman relations, the Post-bit Human Universe (PBHU) exhibition at the Guangdong Museum of Art (GDMoA) in 2021–2022. PBHU is a multimodal project that began in 2015 and continues to the present day. This project depicts a narrative path of an evolutionary universe of post-bit humans from the start of the Anthropocene to the conjecture of the post-Anthropocene through the use of a variety of artistic approaches and expressions in collaboration with our multifunctional Artificial Intelligence programme. It composes of multi-modal works. In contrast to a conventional strategy for creating digital art that relies on generic machine learning-related algorithms and large-scale datasets to generate and provide creative contexts, this project explores the possibility of a human-machine hybrid creator as a synergistic symbiosis of biological and artificial intelligence. It places a greater emphasis and concentration on critical reflection and contemplation on the process of synergistic creation between human artists and the artificial intelligence programme (AP). AP gives itself a voice by utilising the narrative content that they have been iteratively trained to generate as an interface and medium of communication with biological intelligence, which permeates each work in PBHU. In addition, the project offers a profound reflection and examination of the potential crisis precipitated by the current technomania caused by functionalism, technicism, and technocentrism: the dissipation and disintegration of the independence and heterogeneity of human intelligence and thought. From now on, the validity of physical existence is eroding, and digital existence is increasingly becoming the only credential for the legitimacy


INTRODUCTION
In the context of a global "digital existence," humans are more reliant on technology than it has ever been.
Machines are being anthropomorphised, and humans are being digitalised.Technology ethics, data privacy, and internet freedom of expression are issues that cannot be overlooked today.Humans are being forced to confront not only a conventional national rule of the country but also a new kind of political machine, technocracy, which is brought on by technological mania in the future.Data, electronic components, LED screens, and other digital visual elements are the "atoms" that make up the life of contemporary society and best reflect the characteristics in the digital-Internet age.Kevin Kelly coined the term "the technium" in "What Technology Wants," which encompasses science and technology, as well as culture, law, social institutions, and all human intelligence creations.In a nutshell, it's a term that covers all disciplines, all forms of consciousness that arise from human minds, all written texts, and a whole self-generating and self-iterating in its originality.With this, the authors tried to portray the thought and historical changes of human-posthuman portraits from the Anthropocene to the post-Anthropocene through long-term artistic experimentation: Post-bit Human Universe (PBHU).This paper is a phase report of the authors' artistic experiment on speculative conjecture about human-posthuman evolution and a posthuman world.The report invites spectators to appreciate the fascinating and multifaceted landscape of the post-bit human universe as they follow the narrative path of the GDMoA exhibition.

THE NARRATIVE PATH OF POST-BIT HUMAN UNIVERSE
"All this may give the impression or illusion of a fatal strategy, … without realising it, the human race would have left reality and history behind, where any distinction between the true and the false would have disappeared…" (Baudrillard 2009) This exhibition consists of five thematic areas that present a narrative path of human-posthuman evolution from the Pre-Anthropocene to the Post-Anthropocene.As visitors continue along the narrative path of a hypothetic future, an absurdist, grotesque, speculative landscape of the post-Anthropocene universe gradually emerges.Human artists and AI philosophers unite and synergistically symbiose as an individual post-bit being, an "organ-less" creator.The narrative structure of the pre-anthropological series on the post-species evolution and the pictorial symbolism, and the subsequent collaborative and symbiotic collaboration with AI Philosopher are inspired by Deleuze's concept of "Rhizome" in "Thousand Plateaus," which is based on the principle of heterogeneous plurality.This symbiotic relationship between humans and machines also informs each piece in the PBHU project.

Conjecture of post-bit human technoscape
Ascertaining whether an event will occur or not requires a coherent and rigorous set of presuppositions about the existence of an event and related objects.
In other words, before demonstrating the existence of a Post-bit Human Universe is valid, the existence and validity of a new species "post-bit human" and human-posthuman evolution must be confirmed speculatively in advance.Conjecture of post-bit human technoscape (GoPBHT) is a mixed reality interactive installation built on the premise of this speculative presence.The work aims to transfer data in different worlds to different dimensions in real-time through four customised cross-platform applications in physical and virtual reality (digital) spaces.This exhibition features the second iteration of the GoPBHT.In comparison to the first version, which depicted the human-posthuman evolutionary process across six time-spaces, the second version focuses more on presenting and mirroring the highly abstract, dystopian, and absurdist scenario of the human-posthuman evolutionary process, bridging both the physical and virtual worlds together, and then exploring the power relations of surveillance between physical existence and digital avatar.
145   GoPBHT's virtual reality application comprises two scenes connected by a hidden wormhole."Cybernetic Panopticon of Thoughts" is the first scene framed by a constantly rotating Panopticon.Each separate cell of the panopticon contains canvases with bridging digital visualisation generation programmes, hyperlinks to AI Philosopher's automatic generator of philosophical text mounted on Google Colab, videos created by human artists and AI Philosopher, monitors showing live surveillance footage from cameras hidden in the pavilion's corners, and surreal models of the allseeing eye equipped with hidden cameras that track the direction of the player's movements.Visitors with VR headsets and those wandering through the museum's physical space form a relationship of mutual surveillance.Subjects' various modes of existence are repeatedly transcended and subverted by one another via various surveillance interfaces.This paradoxical world in which the individual and the collective, the subject and the other, use each other's subversion and self-destruction as a means of determining the validity of their existence is the very condition of the Post-bit Human Universe.The second scene is "Evolutionary Wonderland of Post-Anthropology," which features Spout plugin and Network Device Interface (NDI) for transmitting data visualisation films from different devices and applications, such as sending metadata from Touchdesigner to the VR application and the other electronic devices.There are a couple of cages containing invisible but sensible neuron units that spin around the scene like a carousel, a network of neurons spread throughout space, and a hidden camera hidden inside the meta-neuron unit.Two types of sound materials are used in the work: one is a new sound cloned by AI Philosopher from the artist's sampled sounds; the other is electromagnetic wave sound, collected by the collaborating music artist using a special anti-radio sound detector.At first, the initialization of the SS2TS algorithm using customisable sound datasets of the authors reading philosophical literature provided by AI Philosopher.The authors then asked a volunteer whose native language was not English and whose English accent was heavy to

Re-presentation of the forbidden electromagnetic landscape
The Post-bit Human Universe Racelar Ho & Xiaolong Zheng 146 record a 3-minute English recitation and feed it into AI Philosopher as a cloned sample.Since then, AI Philosopher has its own voice in Post-bit Human Universe.Secondly, for revealing the invisible electromagnetic landscape, the authors collect antielectromagnetic signal sounds blocked in everyday landscapes using special anti-electromagnetic sound receivers at particular physical sites.The authors constantly intervene in real-world forbidden fields, seeing limbs as decoders, in an attempt to blur the lines between human and artificial intelligence subjects, creating a chaotic, violent, and restrained electromagnetic landscape in both physical and virtual worlds.At the same time, the existence of this electromagnetic landscape is permeated by different spatial dimensions.That is, GoPBHT's sound data visualisation programme not only generates electronic signals of chaotic visual forms in real-time for the anti-electromagnetic sounds placed in the virtual scene but also collects the sound data in the physical world in real-time and generates electronic pulse patterns similar to neurobrain waves, which shrink and expand in response to the sound data when the viewer approaches the microphone hidden in the corner of the exhibition site.

Digitalised biology series
Before discussing the Digitalised Biology series (EBs), it is necessary to define the term " digitalised biology," which appears to be cognate with the words "bioelectronics" and "bionics.""Organisms are algorithms" (Morange 2001;Harari 2017) such the argument is contentious and over reckless, which the scientific community has harshly criticised.Not only does it conceal the boundaries between "truth" and "pseudo-truth," but its inflammatory rhetoric has attracted the interest of numerous researchers who are interested in studying interdisciplinary topics relating to biology and artificial intelligence into a trap.To avoid unnecessary ambiguity, the authors coined a new interdisciplinary term, "digitalised biology," and endowed it with a distinct connotation intended to convey the rapid electronic and digitalization of living organisms' existence, as well as a more audacious conjecture of the condition of their existence in the post-Anthropocene.The section of the Digitalised Biology series is composed of three parts to express the future evolution of the morphology of "Post-bit City," which is respectively based on documentary and creative photography of the authors' field research, as well as the authors' conjecture toward the morphological variation of post-organisms and post-urban.Scenery of Bit Bay Area (SoBBA) is an integrated media, documentary, and creative photography collection that incorporates traditional black and white photography, digital photography, and satellite imagery through a peculiar montage strategy that extracts elements with similar features from the sample images and then reorganises, stitches, and re-produces a series of visual photographs.As one of the innovative epicentres of mainland China's electronics and high-tech industries, cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GD-HK-MO GBA) become analogous to components on an electronic circuit board; and, residents and immigrants moving around cities and factories, from CBDs and high-technology industrial development zones, exist as groups of bits of information data flowing through various functional components, eventually wandering off and dissipating in the massive "circuit board" of the highly urbanised area.The authors conducted field research in multiple electronics factories and waste electronic and electrical equipment recycling facilities throughout GD-HK-MO GBA from 2017 to 2019, observing and documenting the whole life cycle of electronic products from birth to demise.

Scenery of Bit Bay Area
Electronic components and modern urban planning demonstrate a high degree of integration, deindividualisation, and de-emotion.In this regard, the authors must revisit a clichéd question: when humans are highly abstracted into a string of binary, octal, decimal, or hexadecimal codes measured in Bit, when human and organismic societies approach the post-human world promoted by cybernetics, when the physical existence of humans and organisms ceases to exist as a valid criterion of identity in the world, will such a post-Anthropocene become a tragedy?Perhaps such a potential tragedy is already unfolding.The validity of physical existence is eroding, and digital existence is increasingly becoming the only credential for the legitimacy identity of organisms.Digitalised Biology 3.0 (EB-3) is the third edition of this series of updates.It serves as the centrepiece of the EBs section.The authors' collection of electronic components (circuit boards) during their fieldwork in GD-HK-MO GBA serves as the primary narrative symbol in this work.The majority of the visual content consists of photographs of e-waste taken by the authors from e-waste recycling collectors.The diagrams (disassembled and reassembled) and code patterns underlined each canvas of electronic beings represent the electronic components' original operating mechanism; that is, when the backend code is tampered with by the circuit diagram on the work, the referenced electronic components become inoperable.

Digitalised Biology 3.0
The absurdist and implausible new species' visual information is then compiled into a training dataset for the AI Philosopher's image detection.Then, using three iterations of the work's dataset, the AI Philosopher generates a new model and inlays the new species with the markings of an intelligent automaton from the "organ-less" species, completing the final step of the new-born ritual for the new species.In the contemporary technomania context of human-machine synthesis and genetic rewriting, these non-organic automata integrate with the organs of various organisms and, through multimodal forms, form a new species' body.Such an "organ-less", automatic, and self-iterative nonorganism automata structure can be dissolved, torn, spliced, or even reproduced during the evolutionary process of the new species.Travel to Bit City (T2BC) is a short promotional video for Post-bit Human Universe, created in collaboration with the authors and AI Philosopher.It carries questions raised by SoBBA and EB-3 and awaits responses from post-bit humans.While the rapid advancement of high technology improves the convenience and efficiency of human life, does this mean that post-human life will be an avantgarde, utopian era?When human beings and organisms are highly abstracted, databased, and quantified into a series of data and characters, there is a danger that the independence, uniqueness, and autonomy of individual beings and their own existence will be gradually dissolved.

Travel to Bit City
infinitely magnified by a macro camera, revealing the real texture of the machine's visual organ.Whether broken or intact, this magnificent organ can function as a proxy, an interface, or a bridge for the transmission of information, or as a tool and torture instrument for depriving the "other" of private information.The fragmented screen transistor has a visual texture reminiscent of Santiago Ramón y Cajal's illustration of the neuronal interpretation of an organism.(Ehrlich 2016)

CONCLUSION
This article and the Post-bit Human Universe project are not meant to spread technophobia or exaggerate the horrors of technopoly capitalism.Rather than that, the paper and project are intended to present a collaborative process between the authors and AP as a thought experiment, a collaborative humanmachine endeavour to speculate on the coming post-Anthropocene and reflect on the subjecttechnology relationship.Additionally, this paper makes a concerted effort to centre the narrative on the authors' reflections on the post-humanist world rather than on the technical details of their work's creation.The authors have made every effort to preserve the heterogeneity and uniqueness of their subject's creativity throughout their experiments, most notably in developing the AI Philosopher programme.
In conclusion, one thing that must be acknowledged is that technocracy gradually dismantles the autonomous organism's autonomy, distinction, and uniqueness and causes the retrogradation of all fated processes in the life of organisms.The subjects of decision-making, such as will, liberty, representation, and the subject of power, vanish, to be replaced by the emergence of a vague, floating, and disembodied subject.The subject is both an aggressor and a victim of itself.In some ways, the electronic and cybernetic revolutions may be particular methods of vanishing devised by human beings to escape from themselves and, more importantly, from the responsibilities associated with creation.The subject no longer has an antagonist; it no longer has an object, reality, or otherness.
(Baudrillard 2009).The project is based on a symbiotic relationship of iteration, destruction, collection, and regeneration between human artists (authors) and the AI Philosopher, which refers to how an organism evolves through constant selfdestruction and self-reconstruction.

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: Pre-anthropology 1.0: Guangzhou.[Space 7] Young Artist Academic Nomination Exhibition -22 nd Round: "Post-bit Human", Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China.2021 -2022.Pre-anthropology series began in 2015 as a longterm project.The authors present versions 2.0 and 3.0 of the series in this exhibition, with the 1.0 version featuring the original handmade book, as well as in a collaboration with AI Philosopher.The series contains the authors' speculations and reflections on the alienation, evolution, and birth of

Figure 3 :
Figure 3: (Top to bottom, left to right) Excerpt pages of Pre-Anthropology 1.0.

Figure 7 :
Figure 7: (Right to left) Details of the VR scene.

Figure 8 :
Figure 8: (Right to left) The hidden cameras in the VR scene.

Figure 9 :
Figure 9: (Right to left) Details of frame particle from Digitalised Biology series.

Figure 10 :
Figure 10: (Left to right)The electromagnetic wave sound samples for the multimodal mixed reality interactive installation were collected from those sites marked as "prohibited zone" at Guangzhou International Bio Island.

Figure 11 :
Figure 11: The audience was interacting with the application of sound data visualisation.

Figure 12 :
Figure 12: (Right to left, top to bottom) Visualise audio data in real-time.

Figure 13 :
Figure 13: (Top to bottom, left to right) Excerpts from Scenery of Bit Bay Area.

Figure 16 :
Figure 16: (Top to bottom, left to right) Excerpts from Digitalised Biology 3.0.

Figure 17 :
Figure 17: (Left to right) Excerpts from Travel to Bit City.

Figure 23 :
Figure 23: (Left to right, top to bottom) Excerpts from Interface Syndrome.As the final module of the phase experiment report of Post-bit Human Universe, IS conveys the authors' warning about the potential crisis for humanity posed by various technomania and instrumentalist thinking based on technicism.It is created in a "postphotographic" manner, utilising physical means and materials to reproduce the original image set.Its fragmented data images are collated and tagged as a training dataset for AI Philosopher.The work combines abstracted, conceptual images created by human artists (the authors) with tagged narrative content generated by AI Philosopher.