The Machine Ghost in the Human Shell by Kawita Vatanajyankur and Pat Pataranutaporn is set to premier at the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Australia

"The Machine Ghost in the Human Shell"explores an inescapable question: If intelligent machines are merging with our minds and eventually becoming the sources of our "souls," are our physical bodies becoming mere machines covering something else's ghosts? In other words, do intelligent machines become the synthetic ghost while human bodies become the corporeal machine? Or is it possible that by merging these two opposites—the "natural" and "artificial," "human" and "machine"—this evolution will transform the co-connected human/machine into a completely transcendent new being whose perceptions, realizations, and values will be rebuilt within new realities?

In Vatanajyankur and Pataranutaporn's previous works in the "Cyber Labour" series, the collaborators highlighted their concerns about "the humanized machines and the machinized humans." Their artistic research focused on the possibilities of human dehumanization if humans unconsciously follow machines' guidance, suggestions, and biases without awareness and careful consideration.

In "The Machine Ghost in the Human Shell," Vatanajyankur collaborates with Pat Pataranutaporn to explore the possible concept of the "artificial ghost"—a new source of human complexity that dominates physical and psychological senses such as thoughts, feelings, behavioral patterns, and values. The live performance follows the artificial ghosts' impulse to recreate new realities, perceptions, and patterns towards post-capitalism; a new system navigated by intelligent machines inside human bodies. By being mentally and physically led by AIs, Vatanajyankur, who appears as a second layer behind the artificial ghost, becomes a performing puppet mastered by these new foreign ghosts. Her joints will be attached to electric muscle stimulations controlled and piloted by the performer AI's movements to recreate patterns generated by the AI with a transparent string.

This performance is inspired by Norbert Wiener's book The Human Use of Human Beings, which suggested, "When human atoms are knitted into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs, levers, and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood." The knitted pattern symbolizes the restructuring of an imaginative system composed with a machine mind. Through physical and psychological control, her body becomes a cog in this tangled synthetic web. The performance explores Vatanajyankur's mental ability and capability to be consciously aware of her new synthetic masters, to decide on her own choices of free will, and eventually escape the conquests of the machinized ghosts. The work questions what it means to be an existing being if Vatanajyankur is unable to resist machine domination within herself while undeniably uniting and merging with machines into a new transcendent being.