Machine Civilization: Exploring Machine Alterity through a Generative Semiotic Installation 35

Machine Civilization is a multi-screen mechanical installation that imagines an autonomous system observing the world through diverse machine perspectives and generating scripts independent of human semantic frameworks. The installation implements a real-time system of observation, interpretation, collective deliberation, and script inscription, producing formal familiarity and semantic untranslatability. Taking this artwork as a case, this study starts from machines’ autonomous cognitive features and takes “machine writing” as its entry point to explore three issues in the intelligence era: the gap between interpretability and understandability, the flow of meaning between humans and machines, and the ethical encounter with the machine as the Other. Inspired by Levinas’s concept of alterity, the work challenges anthropocentric perspectives by emphasizing machine cognition’s autonomy beyond human semantics. This study contributes to expanding the epistemological and ethical discussion on non-human intelligence through artistic practice, and exploring more open modes of interaction with the technological Other.