Abstract This video, accompanied by a media archeology paper, audits the sealed archive of one of the most influential type specimens of American science history and famous “feral” children in popular culture, marking the slip of this word to cover not wild and unsocialized but imprisoned and deprived. Susan Wiley was disappeared and confined in isolation for 13 years by her abusive parents. For the next 5 years she was intensively scrutinized as a scientific research subject. Taken as a control variable of human isolation, she -as represented through her scientific case- is massively influential in the fields of child development, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and -I argue- the architectures of unsupervised deep machine learning in artificial intelligence today.
I join a legacy of critical inquiry regarding the ethics of her treatment as a “forbidden experiment” pseudonymed “Genie” to emerge and grant the wishes of researchers.Namely, she is instantiated as the scientific subject used to test the now defunct Lenneberg "critical period" hypothesis: that (what counts as) language must be acquired by puberty or it will not be acquired at all. Her case still widely taught, with the general conclusion that neglect made her incapable of learning to express herself. This is false. And, in the search to fit her to this experiment, so much is lost about her own ways of knowing and communicating in the world.*
In affiliatively refocusing on her actions of expression that have slipped the archive’s seal and official scientific narrative, I find cause to challenge the assumptions that rest on her. Visual, somatic, and spatial modelling reveal ways to repatriate this sealed archive of primary source documents about, of, and by her to her: culturally, historically, internationally, poetically, politically, musically, speculatively, and actually. Now, with an idea of what is there and possible, I want to ask Susan what she wants.
*Including ASL. Interpretation by Joyce Hom.