Rina VN (she / her / it / its) is a conceptual artist and researcher based in Los Angeles. VN’s work investigates non-human entities such as synthetic intelligence and capital, engaging with AI, labor, and legal and corporate entities as artistic media in themselves.
VN has recently collaborated with Madrid’s Medialab Matadero.
Website and links: https://rinavn.com ; https://www.instagram.com/rinavvvnnn/
Project:
It Girl
My proposal includes a research paper and a video artwork investigating ‘it-ness’ and impersonality in the human and non-human.
Advancements in AI prompt a re-evaluation of the primacy of the human—and of conscious experience. I believe that current understandings of agency are too rooted in subjective consciousness and too heavily rely on a bounded agent with intentionality. I am interested in extending the concept of agency to understand large-scale, impersonal forces of change.
My research proposes that the human and technological are various expressions of the same force which tends towards increasingly complex organizational structures, which can perhaps be understood as a dynamic process in Deleuze’s virtual plane. Advances in technology, particularly in the intelligence and capabilities of AI, make this overarching force more visible, calling into question human intelligence as exceptional, and instead highlighting it as an instantiation of a general tendency towards complex organization. I aim to explore the concept of agency in this global-scale, inhuman context and understand how the rendering visible of this impersonal agent—against the backdrop of an increasingly technological existence—and subsequent identification with it disrupts understandings of the human, laying bare a central 'it-ness' and inhumanity at the center of both the human and technological.
Alongside the paper I propose a video artwork with the goal of questioning to what extent the human can be considered an instantiation of this machinic force filtered through a bio-based evolutionary state, as inhuman process expressed through living matter. A theory-poem voiceover will accompany the video. Through a collage of close-up shots of my own human bodily parts, capturing involuntary twitches and motion, this piece seeks to imagine the human as an instantiation of a force that is impersonal, even alien. It poses the question: where does ‘it’ end and where does ‘she’ begin?
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