Marco Donnarumma

Amygdala is an artificially intelligent (AI) robot in the form of an uncanny human-like limb hung inside an industrial-grade computer server cabinet. Disturbing and yet sensual, abject and sinuous, Amygdala uses a knife to manipulate and sculpt a large piece of skin. Its labour is repetitive, careful and neverending. The robot’s only aim is, in fact, to learn a ritual of purification known as “skin-cutting”.

This is a kind of religious ritual consisting in cutting one’s skin in specific patterns. Skin-cutting rituals are found across indigenous religions in Papua New Guinea, Africa and Eastern Asia, while Christian and Muslim religions include similar, blood-letting rituals too, albeit in different forms and conceptualisations. Through the experience of both pain and body-altering wounds resulting from the ritual, one achieves “purification”.

Rituals of purification and AI technology share a key role in the politics surrounding the human body. Purification rituals are among the most ancient means of social categorization. In any kind of religion, in fact, participation to particular rituals, often via payment of goods or money, grants access to social positions.

In a similar, but perverse and dangerous way, today’s participation to AI algorithm analysis, via private and browsing data, grants and regulates access to medical assistance, social welfare and criminal systems. Amygdala thus reanimates a key symbol of human history through the glare of today’s technocratic society.

Amygdala is driven by biomimetic neural networks. Essentially, these are iterative mathematical equations, computed by the robot in real time. The specific kinds of neural networks behind Amygdala imitate the sensorimotor system of animals. This means that the robot’s movement are not pre-programmed, but emerge spontaneously from the activity of the neural networks.

Because the neural networks receive sensory information from the robot’s body in real time, the robot can adapt to any physical change or constraint in its environment. As a result, Amygdala is capable of a markedly organic, interactive and changing behaviour recalling animal’s movements. The prosthesis’ ever-changing dynamics of cutting are legible in the remains of the skin garments that it manipulates during each exhibition. All the garments are collected in a series of sculptures entitled Calyx.

Amygdala is part of the 7 Configurations cycle (2014-2019), a series on the conflicts surrounding the human body in the era of artificial intelligence (AI). A previous iteration of this artwork, Amygdala MK1, can be viewed here.