THE NEKRA PROJECT IN PROCESS: AI, Mortality, & Creative Synergy
2024 | Role: Creative development, Shoot Director, Editor, Co-Creative Producer
Performance artist, writer, and director Lori Baldwin invited me to join her in creating a multi-phased, multidisciplinary project. While our collaboration is underway, here's a brief preview of our work together.
NEKRA, an AI-powered humanoid robot designed within the context of palliative care, is poised to create a product that helps humans accept their impermanence. The Artist embodies this role in a narrative blending fiction and reality. The project will evolve into a series of immersive performances, on-chain collectibles, music, and video art. It is set to integrate artificial intelligence and neuroscience research while using Web3 technologies as a performative tool.
My aesthetic alignment with Baldwin was quickly clear. The vision: ambitious, story-driven, and interdisciplinary resonated with my sensibilities. It is a playful take on corporate branding through an artistic lens. It brims with intriguing questions about form, genre, and audience. Most importantly, it offers an opportunity to process the philosophical questions that artists and humanity confront at this juncture, as the promises and unknowns of AI loom large.
Understanding the challenges of seed phase ventures, where creative entrepreneurs like Baldwin must assume many roles, I am able to respond with symbiotic and adaptable support that holds space for the creative process and advances project goals. I’ve served Baldwin as a creative sparring partner and evolved to shoot director, editor, and co-creative producer. I’ve helped shape a rich visual, conceptual, and auditory landscape, as well as providing consultation, solutions, and pragmatism to execute work in project Phase 0.
“As The NEKRA Project began taking shape, I enlisted Monica as a creative brainstorming partner. I love their ability to see the essence of what is being created, support that creation, and add input to propel the vision further than I could have imagined. This is the crux of a valuable collaboration. I felt absolutely on fire after our conversations. This skill that Monica has of deep listening, understanding, and expanding is absolutely priceless.” - Lori Baldwin
THE BIRTH OF NEKRA
What connects AI and Death? The Unknown.
The Birth of NEKRA begins an exploration of the questions at the heart of this parallel, while the specter of black box AI looms large in our times. The impenetrable inner workings of certain machine learning processes create gaps in human ability to gather information, an idea mirrored by the deep unknowns surrounding death and mortality.
NEKRA is born from the void, from a place where the bounds of her capability are unchartered. We see her consuming data as she forms herself, a reference to the composite process of generative AI.
Mimicking AI’s own performativity as human, in the live-action production of The Birth of NEKRA, Baldwin performs as AI. As human creativity grapples with its future collaborator or its replacement, Baldwin has created an alter-ego that serves as a vessel for this conversation.
As an on-chain looping video, NEKRA’s birth is eternal. The emergence of this new deity is memorialized not in painting or marble, but as a digital artifact that will remain long after the humans who created it are gone.
Watch The Birth of NEKRA genesis NFT featuring NEKRA on ZORA. For an optimal viewing experience, dim the lights and listen with headphones.
Additional early works from this collaboration premiered at The Human Lab 4.0 at P61 Gallery in Berlin. Along with the Fractals video installation, NEKRA observed gallery-goers live in the space, harvesting data to feed the the project’s unfolding narrative.
Credits:
Lead Artist, Performer, Producer: Lori Baldwin
Director, Producer, Editor: Monica De Alwis
Cinematographer: Madeleine Peters
Sound Artist: Neven
Costume Designer: Josefina Studio
With the kind support of Theaterhaus Berlin
Photo Credit: Oliver Look
All images are the copyrighted property of Lori Baldwin.