The Known Lost

Swiss Institute (SI) is pleased to present The Known Lost, the first exhibition of the work of writer, artist, and musician K Allado-McDowell. Featuring a stage set composed of theatrical backdrops, a platform and a microphone, the exhibition is a rehearsal and performance space for Act I of an opera by Allado-McDowell with the same title. The gallery scenography depicts a proposed monument, which are made to recognize and honor all species that have lived and gone extinct on Earth. Presented in the lower-level gallery, the monument is rendered in a graphic style, reminiscent of early 20th century European Spiritualist painting, across seven cloth backdrops. In the center, a platform hosts a set of books, which contains a list of the scientific names of the 180,285 known extinct species from all kingdoms that Allado-McDowell has compiled from paleobiology databases. This list functions as the libretto of the opera and as the names to be engraved into the monument. While the list acknowledges and celebrates life, it also frames life as ephemeral. Visitors are invited to read or sing the names of the species over an original score by composer Derrick Skye. In doing so, they collectively rehearse and perform the first act of the opera, realizing the monument in the collective imagination – a foundational step towards its eventual construction. As species continue to go extinct, their names are added to the monument in a recurring ritual performance designed to continuously honor life on Earth. Projected into the stage set version of The Known Lost monument at SI, visitors wander the metaphoric terraces of the quarry, reading a seemingly endless ledger of lost species names. Its caverns host the sounds of the opera — amidst other products of interspecies relationships — in an attempt to break the human-centric gaze inherent in our systems and technologies, reorient ourselves in a larger biospheric and ancestral frame, and face the incalculable loss that is yet to come. This exhibition is curated by Alison Coplan, Chief Curator. The Known Lost is made possible in part through the support of Molly Gochman. K Allado-McDowell is a writer, artist, and musician. They have authored several books with GPT-3, co-edited and contributed to multiple anthologies, and regularly publish essays on art, AI and ecology. They created the neuro-opera Song of the Ambassadors, and record and release music under the name Qenric. They established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google in 2015. Allado-McDowell has spoken at TED, The Long Now Foundation, New Museum, Tate, Serpentine Gallery, HKW, Moderna Museet, Christie’s, MacArthur Foundation, MfN Berlin, Ars Electronica, Sónar, and many other venues, and has taught at SCI-Arc, Strelka, and IAAC.

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