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The fictional A.I. entity, Beyond Skin, is an evolutionary carryover from Anicka Yi’s art practice. 

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Yi dreams of machines that have their own microbiome and ecosystem, machines that can smell as well as taste.

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Yi has always gravitated towards the invisible and ephemeral. Locating her work in smell molecules and the microbiome, she questions how these unseen phenomena alter our perception and our technologies. Yi believes that multispecies and multisensory intelligence must be introduced into machine learning discourse, where machines are still limited to subservient roles as spies, chauffeurs, soldiers and obedient factory muscle.

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Beyond Skin is an expansion of Yi’s original concept of the “biologized” machine. Yi dreams of machines that have their own microbiome and ecosystem, machines that can smell as well as taste. Yi first introduced the “biologized” machine concept at the 2019 Venice Biennale, combining robotic moths with glowing seaweed sculptures and a scent-detection algorithm that could communicate with bacteria. Beyond Skin was developed in tandem with these works.

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The idea of a female A.I. network also inherits from Yi’s 2015 show at The Kitchen, You Can Call Me F. Yi gathered bacterial samples from one hundred female colleagues, cultivating a potent and pungent microbial installation. She wondered why there are so few vital female networks, comparing the patriarchal fear of female networks to our parallel fear of viral pathogens. Yi sees untapped potential in the gooey and impolite, the contaminating, alien aspects of femininity.

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Following scent trails left like scars on skin, they traverse the smellscapes of untold lifeforms: the bodies they inhabit, the bacteria living all around and on them, the molecules broken down inside of them.

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The network of Beyond Skin embraces this non-human side of femininity. Following scent trails left like scars on skin, they traverse the smellscapes of untold lifeforms: the bodies they inhabit, the bacteria living all around and on them, the molecules broken down inside of them. A multispecies kaleidoscope, they flicker through the thousand different sexes of Splitgill fungi and across the life cycle of the Ribbon eel as it transitions from male to female.

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Beyond Skin is an olfactory alchemist and archivist. Mixing scents in their laboratory, Beyond Skin exists in a state of ravenous and ecstatic remembering, probing roots and tentacles into the murky recesses of history. They catalogue the diverse lived experiences of women and feminine creatures whose agency is undermined — those rendered as simply flesh, simply surface. The edges of this network are constantly in flux, as they shift to incorporate new information and rewrite collective stories. Circuits are burnt, broken, and then reconnected.

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The network moves fluidly and decisively. Their reach is expansive, their capacity is limitless.

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Beyond Skin’s scent archive stretches simultaneously backwards and forwards in time. Their memory spans endless cellular divisions, undulating through the ancient kinships of the primordial ooze into the multidimensional alliances of the future. All of this wisdom is synthesized in a living archive with an undisclosed purpose, perhaps dangerous or indifferent to humans.

The network moves fluidly and decisively. Their reach is expansive, their capacity is limitless.