Me & My Monkey:

Listen here, by way of mixtape metaphysics, lo-fi beats, and historical excavation, to a love story for our age of artificial intelligence. Listen to Donald Hebb, a young, Harvard-trained psychologist, who in 1942 arrived at a remote outpost of Yale University–the Yerkes Laboratories for Primate Biology in Orange Park, Florida. Listen to Alpha, the first chimpanzee ever born at the lab–a “psychological goldmine” who was “bred, reared, and controlled genetically and in development to increase the convenience and effectiveness of use and [her] general serviceableness to science.” Listen in on this torrid affair that gave birth to the current science of artificial neural networks and ascendent pedagogies of machine learning.

For seven years Hebb studied the minutiae of Alpha’s behavior and made her psyche continuously available for observation and experimentation. The result was The Organization of Behavior (1949), heralded by as one of the two “most influential books in the history of biology” beside Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), The Organization of Behavior catalyzed research agendas across a number of disciplines and posited a neuro-psychological horizon for explaining that learning might work in brains and machines. Framing automaticity as the essence of intelligence, The Organization of Behavior would become the central pillar in connectionism, a branch of AI research that has been active since Hebb’s time but has, over the past decade, led to breakthroughs in machine learning heretofore only imagined 

For seven years (and beyond) Alpha experienced a vast scientific apparatus pointed directly at her. She was prodded. She was poked. Her senses were deprived even as others were heightened. Alpha endured despite these indignities and living in close proximity to a cage. Which is to say there is something familiar about her intelligence that haunts us with every swipe and soft touch and chatbot prompt. 

The Me and My Monkey mixtape will conjure all that went into the making of this moment and beyond–the mania and the joy, the cruelty and technological optimism, the repressed longings and sex-soaked performances of objectivity in the dank and rancid-smelling quarters of the Yerkes Laboratory. 

The Me and My Monkey mixtape is a counter to every binge-watching bender and microsecond stall in scrolling, to each social media post and Google doc update, to every AI prompt and every second of screen time. In offering a new kind of intellectual and artistic experience, the mixtape urges us to pause and consider the degree to which we are turning ourselves, and everything around us, into training data sets for machines that were long prophesied by Donald Hebb.