Non-human intelligence and the limits of the venn diagram

The Venn diagram is a comforting tool. Two circles, an overlap, a clean visual claim about how much one thing has in common with another. When the two circles are a human being and a single-celled green alga, however, the diagram begins to feel inadequate.

It is not that the numbers are wrong. The homologous-gene research is precise, and the overlap is, by most reasonable measures, large. It is that the diagram cannot hold what the overlap actually is — a shared deep history, a shared chemistry, a shared dependence on light.

The Aggregate Accessory was an attempt to put a body around the diagram. A piece of cloth, a small video, a hand-made object you could pick up. I wanted the visitor to leave the room not with a fact but with a slight unsteadiness about what kind of thing a human is.

If there is a politics here, it is a quiet one. The Anthropocene is, among other things, a problem of imagination: we have become very good at picturing ourselves as separate. The job of the studio, for now, is to keep picturing it the other way.