Nancy Baker Cahill: CENTO

On view
Online

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.
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.

Nancy Baker Cahill, CENTO, 2023. Top: screenshot from CENTO AR component; bottom: screenshot from CENTO video

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Nancy Baker Cahill’s CENTO consists of a monumental augmented-reality (AR) “creature,” hovering over the eighth-floor terrace of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and an accompanying video. The video flies through the creature’s trifold habitat—the nest, the refueling chamber, and the space where the creature metabolizes fuel and takes flight. The video ends with instructions for downloading a free AR app that allows users to place feathers on the creature’s body and witness its evolution on their devices from the Whitney’s terraces. Viewers unable to visit the Museum can follow CENTO’s development through the documentation 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 with scales and mycelium (the vegetative part of a fungus), limbs like a cephalopod (the marine animals whose heads directly connect to arms), a manta ray wing, and feathers. The entity is collectively transformed through participatory AR: each of the twelve feathers users can add to the body through the app offers a different benefit, such as communication, navigation, or energy conversion.

CENTO points to the necessity of coexistence and intersection of beings in the face of the climate crisis. It positions different species as one interconnected body and asks whether an organism imagined as a collage could fulfill or even exceed evolutionary requirements. CENTO takes its name from the term for a poem consisting of lines from other poets’ works, alluding both to the creature and the audience’s contributions to the work.

AR production by 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 Download 4th Wall

Nancy Baker Cahill (b. 1970; Cambridge, Massachusetts) is an 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. 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 exhibitions include Slipstream: Table of Contents at Vellum, Los Angeles (2022); and the traveling midcareer retrospective Through Lines, which originated at the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens (2023). Baker Cahill is an artist scholar alumnus of the Berggruen Institute, Los Angeles, and a 2021 resident at Occidental University’s Oxy Arts Encoding Futures: Speculative Monuments for L.A., focused on AR monuments. She has received the 2026 USA Fellowship Award, the 2025 Full Dome Festival's Janus Award for Best Feature Film, the 2024 Infinity Festival's Monolith Award for New Media Fine Art, and the 2022 LACMA Art +Tech Grant, among others.

Press highlights

"…viewers on site and around the globe can add feathers to its chimeric body—an act of evolutionary resilience in the face of an increasingly hostile and unpredictable climate"—Surface

"Hovering above the museum’s top story, CENTO is a hybrid, interspecies creature of the artist’s creation, her vision for one possible future for the planet in light of the current climate crisis."—Artnet News

"…the project embraces an ecosophical perspective that challenges the conventional divide between humans and the natural world, tackling the imperative for cross-species collaboration in confronting the climate crisis."—Designboom

"…the interactive project addresses the need for interspecies cooperation in the face of the climate crisis from an ecosophical approach, which criticises the traditional separation of humans from the natural world."—The Art Newspaper

"CENTO is a site-specific augmented reality (AR) creature whose evolution relies on the collective participation of visitors."—La Voce di New York

artport

View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to internet art and its online gallery space for commissions of net art.

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Frank WANG Yefeng, The Levitating Perils #2

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

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