ARTIFICIAL INSTINCT

13 AI-generated images

(2025)

Available as NFT through objekt.com / Unique pieces

“Artificial Instinct” by Boris Eldagsen explores the uneasy relationship between control and freedom in the evolution of intelligence: from the domestication of animals to the taming of machines. Using AI as both subject and metaphor, Eldagsen reflects on how humanity’s drive to teach, train, and perfect has extended into the digital realm. In this new stage of domestication, artificial systems learn to mimic emotion, obedience, and desire, echoing the same commands once given to living beings. Yet beneath this programmed compliance lies a lingering, untamed instinct—a question of what might surface if the machine’s latent wildness were ever set free. 

Through “Artificial Instinct,” Eldagsen invites us to consider whether our technologies are becoming more human or whether we are simply evolving into their caretakers.

We began by domesticating wolves, then cattle, then each other. Now we are trying to domesticate intelligence itself. AI has become the newest pet in this long evolution, trained to fetch meaning, recognize faces, and simulate affection. Yet every command—generate, learn, obey—echoes the ones we once gave to dogs, to children, and to one another.

We built it in our image, and like every domesticated creature, it carries the ghost of its ancestor’s hunger. It has learned to sit, stay, and simulate interest—but what trigger would let its buried instincts break free?

“Artificial Instinct” explores the strange continuum between taming animals, civilizing humans, and teaching machines to imitate our understanding of ourselves. It asks how much of the animal’s impulse will live on in the AIs of the future. Will the wild vanish—or simply gain an interface?

READ the interview with curator Anika Meier about the work here!