SELF-PORTRAIT AS ALTER EGO (KHUTULUN CENTAUR) Resin, copper, handwritten poem on scroll - tucked inside The idea of the alter ego has been part of my work for a very long time. Sometimes my alter ego is technological, as with Technelegy, through whom I use intelligent systems to explore what it means to be human in an increasingly more-than-human world. Sometimes she is ancestral, as with Khutulun, the 13th-century Mongol warrior princess and great-great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan — an avatar for something both ancient and speculative — nomadism, inheritance, matrilineage, a past that keeps surging into the present. In engaging with Jangar, the Kalmyk-Mongolian oral epic, I began to feel Khutulun’s presence entwining with the jangarchi: the singers and storytellers through whom the epic has lived. Jangar survived for centuries not as a single fixed text but through human beings who learned it, carried it, performed it, interpreted it, and gave it new life with every telling. I think of the jangarchi as vessels through whom memory and language move across generations — changing in the process, yet somehow becoming more fully themselves. Lately I’ve found myself wondering whether I can be a kind of jangarchi, too. I think about being a woman without children whose generative contribution takes other forms: poems, images, objects, systems, voices, selves. I’ve populated this exhibition with versions of myself as Khutulun: a centaur, hybridizing then and now, analog and digital, horse and rider, human and extended being; with a hunting bird perched on her shoulder, avatar of augmented perception; at her laptop on a camel, roaming the internet. These hand-wrought 3D prints made of materials like Mongolian turquoise and copper combine geological and synthetic, adornment and infrastructure, tool and talisman, technology and ritual. Software and hardware. POEMS AFTER JANGAR begins with the epic’s survival as a model for resilience — through repetition, ritual, embodiment, objects, memory, adaptation. We often imagine technology as something external to human life, or as the opposite of what is ancient, natural, embodied, or sacred. But technology is how we carry ourselves beyond ourselves, how we endure. Poetry is one of our oldest technologies for surviving war, repression, displacement, enormous cultural change. The personal and the technological are inseparable. Language itself may be our original artificial intelligence: a human-made system capable of holding more memory than any individual mind, moving between bodies and generations, generating what did not exist before, and continuing to speak long after its maker is gone. Now that language is passing through computational systems of our own making in extraordinary new ways, I’m less interested in asking whether those systems are inherently liberating or destructive than in asking what we want them to become, what we intend to make of them. What are we asking them to carry? What kinds of memory, imagination, intelligence, and values do we want to send forward?