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

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 unable 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’s 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, and the 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’s Encoding Futures: Speculative Monuments for L.A., focused on AR monuments, and a TEDx speaker. In 2021, she was awarded the Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor and received the COLA Master Artist Fellowship. She is a 2022 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant recipient and was the January 2023 Resident Artist at Gazelli Art House in London.

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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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In the News

"…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

See more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.

En español

CENTO de Nancy Baker Cahill consiste de una “criatura” monumental de realidad aumentada que sobrevuela la terraza del piso 8 del Museo del Whitney, acompañada de un video que imagina el hábitat de la criatura, parecido a una cueva. El video planea a través de los tres ambientes del hábitat: el nido, la cámara de combustible y el espacio donde la criatura metaboliza el combustible en energía para volar. El final del video incluye instrucciones para instalar una aplicación gratuita de realidad aumentada (RA), que permite a los usuarios colocar plumas en el cuerpo de la criatura y presenciar su evolución en sus teléfonos móviles o tabletas desde las terrazas del Whitney.  

CENTO es una entidad interespecie ficticia, futurística, modificada con bioingeniería que se transforma colectivamente a través de tecnología de RA participativa. Su cuerpo tiene forma de serpentina y está revestido de escamas y micelio (los filamentos que forman la parte vegetativa de un hongo), extremidades como las de un cefalópodo (los animales marinos cuyas cabezas se conectan directamente a los brazos), un ala de mantarraya y plumas de colores. Cada uno de los doce tipos de plumas que se pueden escoger en la aplicación para añadir al cuerpo de CENTO se asocia a funcionalidades distintas relacionadas a la supervivencia evolutiva de la criatura, como la comunicación, la navegación, la conversión de energía o el almacenaje de memoria. 

CENTO señala hacia la necesidad de coexistencia e intersección entre los seres frente a la crisis climática. Posiciona a especies diferentes como un sólo cuerpo interconectado y presta atención a los cuidados y cooperación necesarios para asegurar la supervivencia de formas de vida bajo condiciones cambiantes. La obra se pregunta si una criatura imaginada como un collage entre humano, cefalópodo, microbioma, ave, micelio, especie marina y máquina podría satisfacer o incluso superar los requerimientos evolutivos básicos. CENTO toma su nombre del término con que se nombra a un tipo de poema collage que consiste de versos de poemas de varios autores, aludiendo tanto al cuerpo collage de la criatura como a las contribuciones del público a la obra de arte. 

Producción RA: Shaking Earth Digital 
Sonido por Caleb Craig 

Experimenta CENTO en el Museo del Whitney:
Puedes ver e interactuar con CENTO en persona en las terrazas del Museo del Whitney. El piso 8 es el punto principal y los pisos 5 y 6 brindan ángulos distintos. Usa el código QR en las señalizaciones de la terraza para instalar la aplicación gratuita 4th Wall AR, con la que puedes seleccionar una pluma para añadir a la criatura. 

Experimenta CENTO desde otros lugares del mundo:
Instala la aplicación gratuita 4th Wall AR usando las instrucciones al final del video accesible a través de esta página para seleccionar una pluma para añadir a la criatura. La evolución y la apariencia de CENTO en el Museo del Whitney será documentada regularmente y se añadirán las imágenes a la parte de abajo de esta página.

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

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