A Certain Correctness: Miao Ying's Pilgrimage into Walden XII

Consisting of three chapters so far, Miao’s multimedia work Pilgrimage into Walden XII (2019–2023) combines game engine, video, installation, and a website to create Walden XII, a world governed by AI “social shepherds.” Miao references B. F. Skinner’s controversial novel Walden Two (1948), which depicts a community operating on behavioral engineering, while updating its principles in light of today’s reality of governance and surveillance through big data.
Miao’s Pilgrimage into Walden XII weaves the threads of the body and system through a political facade of governance and control. Against the revolutionary and liberating promises of AI from biological constraints, Miao grounds a search for truth both on and provocatively beyond the rules and realities of the bodily, the organic. This brings up the question of coexistence of bodily experience and AI in behaviors and models, and the tension between unique generation of meaning and principles of moral, ideological, and computational correctness. By examining the operating principles of Walden XII in comparison with Skinner’s Walden Two and China’s social credit system, I attempt at a timely update on the entwined training of bodily skills, engineering of human behavior, and machine learning models that embraces the uncertainties and contingencies afforded by radically different systems and viewpoints.