At the turn of the previous century Henri Bergson suggested that sympathy offered a way to understand interspecies relationships. Samuel Butler took Bergson’s ideas to an absurd extent by mixing them with readings of Charles Darwin and claiming a vital impulse for machines. By interspersing a story of humans and machines with insect life, Butler pointed to a broad imaginative web of interspecies and machinic relationships. Contemporary artists Pierre Huyghe, Ann Lislegaard, and Hayden Fowler use video and installation art to explore interspecies relationships in time and space. In very different ways Huyghe, Lislegaard, and Fowler use the art gallery to demonstrate how humans might sympathetically engage with ecological transformation, and thus the confronting possibility of our own extinction. In looking back at Bergson and Butler through contemporary art, I suggest that the art gallery gives us a sympathetic space in which we can encounter the knowledges of Bergson and Darwin, temper them with the imaginings of Butler, and ground them with the transformative living machines created by Huyghe, Lislegaard, and Fowler. By entering the spaces of the art gallery and locating ourselves in the place of others, sympathy read alongside machinic evolution suggests a new approach to the ecological disaster of species extinction.

中文翻译：

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新的生态同情

在上个世纪初，亨利·伯格森（Henri Bergson）提出同情为理解种间关系提供了一种途径。塞缪尔·巴特勒（Samuel Butler）将伯格森的思想与查尔斯·达尔文（Charles Darwin）的读物融合在一起，并宣称对机器具有至关重要的冲动，从而使伯格森的思想荒唐至极。通过将人类和机器的故事穿插在昆虫的生活中，巴特勒指出了物种与机器关系之间的广泛想象网络。当代艺术家Pierre Huyghe，Ann Lislegaard和Hayden Fowler使用视频和装置艺术探索时空之间的种间关系。休伊，利斯勒加德和福勒以非常不同的方式利用美术馆来展示人类如何同情地参与生态转型，从而面临我们自身灭绝的可能性。在通过当代艺术回顾伯格森和巴特勒的过程中，我建议美术馆为我们提供一个充满同情心的空间，在其中我们可以遇到伯格森和达尔文的知识，以巴特勒的想象力对其进行调适，并以变革性的生活机器为基础由Huyghe，Lislegaard和Fowler创建。通过进入美术馆的空间并将自己置于其他人的位置，与机械进化一起读到的同情心提出了一种应对物种灭绝的生态灾难的新方法。