Cosmosapience: Embodying our Planetary Mind

In this lecture-performance, Memo Akten and Katie Hofstadter (Superradiance) explore the deeply entangled nature of intelligence, computation, and our planetary body and mind; weaving together ancient biotechnologies like poetry, dance, and ritual with artificial intelligence, simulations, and generative systems. As our tech influencers and media race to ascribe personhood and even consciousness to corporate machines that mimic human behaviors, we simultaneously deny the personhood and inherent intelligence of the natural systems that sustain us. This lecture-performance interrogates the limits and implications of these enclosed systems through the lens of planetary ecology and embodied simulation.

We confront the vulnerability of our contradictions: the fact that we are made of trillions of living cells; the illusion of being a single, isolated individual inside our skin; and the reality that we are also part of a larger global organism. We are not discrete entities, but chimeras of ancient starlight, symbiotic microbes, flowing water, and the vast networks of human and non-human minds. How might we reclaim our externalized imagination, and repurpose emerging technologies to reconnect to our planetary consciousness, rather than further sever the connection?

A lecture-performance that refuses the divide between nature and culture, body and algorithm, insisting, alongside Symbiotic Frequencies, that intelligence is not purely computational but physical, relational, and embedded in matter.

Please note: this activity will be in English, with live transcription available.