Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream
Superflux
Artwork Description:
With AI we are witnessing a collapse of plural intelligences into a single computational regime, one that creates an impoverished imagination of what intelligence is allowed to be. Under this technological regime, our bodies of knowledge are becoming worryingly detached from place and time. Through encouraging a deepening of sensory attention to the River Thames, Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream explores other, deeper ways of encoding and understanding intelligence. Our speculative sensors encounter rivers as epistemic sites that resist computational legibility. Although we are increasingly at risk of forgetting, the communities who live along the banks of a river have long known how to read its tidal flows, weather patterns and long temporalities. When seagulls fly inland, storms approach. When certain birds call, the season is turning. And the Thames itself was once a sacred river. For centuries, river dwellers understood it as alive and temperamental. Our research turned up fragments of this hyperlocal ecological intelligence that no large language model has been trained on. We prototyped a small AI model grounded in this alternative data, reconfiguring the systems and structures that determine which ways of knowing are allowed to shape the world. Rather than treating intelligence as something to be optimised, the work looks to rivers as a counter-cosmology to AI posturing. The inversion at its heart restructures human-machine relations: the river prompts us. Screens display invitations to pay attention, and computation is used to slow us down, to tune us into the world we're already part of.
Project Collaborators:
James Bulley: Artist and composer who created the 8.1 spatial soundscape and film score. His practice uses electromagnetic and seismographic microphones to capture environmental vibrations conventional recording cannot reach. Marta Torrent Boix: Metalworker who fabricated the mild steel structures for the three ground-based sensors, continuing a collaboration with Superflux initiated for the Design Museum exhibition. Bettina Zironi: Filmmaker who edited the immersive 7-minute film first exhibited at the Weltmuseum Vienna. Polytechnic: Graphic design studio that created The Craftocene visual identity and designed the muslin weatherlore wall hangings, physically bringing fragments of ecological knowledge into the gallery. The River Thames: The foundational more-than-human collaborator. Named Tamesis (dark/murky) for a Celtic deity, it provides 90% of London’s water but remains shielded by the Thames Barrier. Anonymous Communities: Upstream and downriver populations whose ancestral attunement, folklore, and weatherlore form the project's corpus, reflecting Superflux’s belief that the future is old.
