Nancy Baker Cahill: CENTO

Oct 3, 2023–

Diptych of two images. On top is a alien-looking creature flying in the sky above New York, covered in scales and feathers with a polygonal head. Beneath is the creature's environment, a mass of shapes and darker tones of black and blue, with electricity in the center and water and light above, with one purple feather to the side.

On view
Floor 8

Nancy Baker Cahill’s CENTO consists of a monumental augmented reality “creature” hovering over the Floor 8 terrace of the Whitney Museum, and an accompanying video imagining the creature’s cave-like habitat. The video flies through the three environments of the habitat—the nest, the refueling chamber, and the space where the creature metabolizes its fuel into energy and takes flight. The end of the video includes instructions for downloading a free augmented reality (AR) app that allows users to place feathers on the creature’s body and witness its evolution on their smartphones or tablets from the Whitney Museum’s terraces. Viewers not able to visit the Museum can follow CENTO’s development at the bottom of this page.

CENTO is a fictitious, futuristic bio-engineered interspecies entity collectively transformed through participatory AR. It has a serpentine body lined with scales and mycelium (the filaments that form the vegetative part of a fungus), limbs like a cephalopod (the marine animals whose heads directly connect to arms), a manta ray wing, and colorful feathers. Each of the twelve feathers you can choose in the app and add to CENTO’s body is associated with a different functionality related to the creature’s evolutionary survival, such as communication, navigation, energy conversion, or memory bank.

CENTO points to the necessity of co-existence and intersection of beings in the face of the climate crisis. It positions different species as one interconnected body and draws attention to the care and cooperation needed to ensure the survival of life forms under changing conditions. The work asks whether a creature imagined as a collage of human, cephalopod, microbiome, avian, mycelial, marine, and machine could fulfill or even exceed basic evolutionary requirements. CENTO takes its name from the term for a “collage poem” consisting of lines from other poets’ works, alluding both to the collage body of the creature and the audience’s contributions to the work.

AR production: Shaking Earth Digital
Sound by Caleb Craig

Experience CENTO at the Whitney Museum:
You can view and interact with CENTO in person on the Whitney Museum’s terraces, with Floor 8 as the prime viewing point and Floors 5 and 6 providing different angles. Use the QR code on the terrace signage to download the free 4th Wall AR app to select a feather to add to the creature.

Experience CENTO from locations worldwide:
Download the free 4th Wall AR app through the instructions at the end of the video accessible from this page to select a feather and add it to the creature. CENTO’s evolution and appearance at the Whitney Museum will be regularly documented and images will be linked at the bottom of this page.

Enter project

Nancy Baker Cahill (b. 1970) is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid practice spans research-based immersive experiences, video installations, and conceptual blockchain projects and focuses on systemic power, consciousness, and the human body. Her monumental AR artworks extend and subvert the lineage of Land art, often highlighting the climate crisis, civics, and a desire for more equitable futures. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free, AR public art platform exploring site interventions, resistance, and inclusive creative expression. Baker Cahill’s work has been exhibited internationally at museums and galleries and has earned her profiles in publications such as The New York Times, Frieze Magazine, and The Art Newspaper; she also was included in ARTnews’ list of 2021 'Deciders.' Her exhibitions include Slipstream: Table of Contents at Vellum, Los Angeles (2022), which was acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and her traveling mid-career retrospective Through Lines at the Georgia Museum of Art (October 28, 2023–March 21, 2024).

Baker Cahill is an artist scholar alumnus of the Berggruen Institute, a 2021 resident at Oxy Arts’ ‘Encoding Futures’ focused on AR monuments, and a TEDx speaker. In 2021, she was awarded the Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor and received the C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellowship. She is a 2022 LACMA Art and Tech Grant recipient and was the January 2023 Resident Artist at Gazelli Art House in London.