Emissary Forks at Perfection

Training
in the
Neuro-Gym
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Entropy Wrangler Cloud (Chang & Eng), 2013
Frieze London 2013, Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club
Courtesy of the artist, Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club
Portrait
Ian
Cheng
Trainieren im
Neuro-Gym
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Still aus / from Emissary Forks At Perfection, 2015
Live-Simulation und Story, Ton, Dauer unbegrenzt / Live simulation and story, sound, infinite duration
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Photo:
Courtesy
Achim-Hatzius
of the artist, Pilar Corrias Gallery, Standard (Oslo)
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Courtesy of the artist and Standard (Oslo); Photo: Vegard Kleven
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± human (10/22/2013), 2013, Vektorgrafik im Lentikulardruck / Lenticular printed vector drawing, 100 x 95 cm, Edition of 5
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Figuren fallen durcheinander, Kraniche fliegen auf,
halb fertig gerechnete Hunde streunen durch zerfetzte
Computerspiel-Landschaften. Egal wie lange man vor
den Videoinstallationen von Ian Cheng steht, man kommt der
Logik des Geschehens nicht auf die Spur. Auch der Künstler
selbst weiß vorher nicht, wie sich seine Simulationen entwickeln
werden. Er legt nur die Parameter fest: ein virtuelles
Ökosystem und Charaktere, die teils nach Skript agieren, teils
per Zufall. Die Arbeiten scheinen vor allem mit sich selbst
beschäftigt zu sein, und das wirft einige Fragen auf. Gianni Jetzer
traf den in New York lebenden Künstler zum Gespräch.
Figures fall chaotically, cranes take flight, half-rendered dogs
roam around threadbare computer-game landscapes.
No matter how long you watch Ian Cheng‘s video installations,
the logic of what‘s happening remains out of reach. The artist
himself doesn‘t know how his simulations are going to turn out.
He merely sets the parameters: a virtual ecosystem
and characters whose actions are partly scripted and partly
determined by chance. These works seem to circle around
themselves, which raises several questions. Gianni Jetzer met up
with the New York-based artist for an interview.
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This Papaya Tastes Perfect, 2011; Installationsansicht / Installation view Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami Beach 2011
Os dolorer aeperiti atio. Nam velitiis voluptaes non rem reptatiate voluptatur si delia nosaerum deriam ent.
Stills aus / from Emissary in the Squat of Gods, 2015, Live-Simulation und Story, Ton, Dauer unbegrenzt / Live simulation and story, sound, infinite duration
Courtesy of the artist, Pilar Corrias Gallery, Standard (Oslo)
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Photo: Aurélien Mole
Os dolorer aeperiti atio. Nam velitiis voluptaes non rem reptatiate voluptatur si delia nosaerum deriam ent.
Something Thinking of You, 2015, Live-Simulation und Story, Ton, Dauer unbegrenzt / Live simulation and story, sound, infinite duration
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Installationansicht / Installation view “Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster”, Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research, Paris 2015
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Gianni Jetzer: Du hast Kognitionswissenschaft studiert bevor du dich
entschieden hast, Künstler zu werden. Wissenschaftler wie Künstler stellen sich große Fragen, zum Beispiel: Wie ist die Wirklichkeit strukturiert?, oder: Wie kann Technologie die Gesellschaft voranbringen? Ist es
ein Vorteil, beide Seiten zu kennen?
Ian Cheng: Die Kognitionswissenschaft steht immer im Hintergrund meiner Arbeit. Ich interessiere mich nicht so sehr
für die Frage wie man die physische Realität verändern kann,
sondern eher dafür, wie man Kunst einsetzen kann um das
Bewusstsein auszutricksen. Ich habe ja auch Kognitionswissenschaft studiert, um zu verstehen, wie das Verhalten und
das Denken von Leuten funktioniert. Nach dem Abschluss
konnte ich mir aber schwer vorstellen in einem Labor zu verschwinden und mich für den Rest meines Lebens mit ein oder
zwei Forschungsfragen zu beschäftigen. Die Idee fand ich
ziemlich unheimlich und weltfremd. In der Kunst kann man
sich seine Fragestellungen selbst aussuchen, egal wie anmaßend sie sind. Kunst legitimiert sich darüber, welche Perspektiven sie anbieten kann, egal wie experimentell oder fantastisch sie auch sein mögen, und das gibt
einem als Künstler viel mehr Freiheit.
Jemand hat über deine Arbeit geschrieben, sie
spiele in einem „Neuro-Gym“. Kannst du
damit etwas anfangen?
Ja, der Satz ist nämlich von mir (lacht).
Am liebsten mag ich Arbeiten, die bei
mir direkt ein Gefühl oder eine Stimmung auslösen, die hängen bleiben.
E
Gianni Jetzer: You studied cognitive science
and then decided to become an artist. Both
scientists and artists ask big questions such
as: What is the fabric of reality made of?
How can technolog y move society forward?
Do you benefit from this dual experience?
Ian Cheng: Cognitive science remains in the background of all my
work. It’s always there in the sense
that I think about how art affects the
mind and how you can trick the
mind, rather than how to change the
physical materiality of reality. When I
studied cognitive science, I wanted to
have tools to understand how people
behave and think. After graduating, I
found it hard to imagine myself inside a lab, doing research on one or
two problems for the rest of my life.
That idea felt very scary and removed
from the world. Art can be a place
where you have the freedom to
choose your own problems, at whatever scale you wish. The legitimacy
of art is measured on its capacity to
offer perspective, no matter how experimental or imaginative, and that
allows for a lot more freedom.
Portrait Ian Cheng
Auch wenn die Arbeit voller komplexer Konzepte und Perspektiven ist, ist dieser Eindruck der Schlüssel. Wenn ein
Kunstwerk ein körperliches Gefühl hervorruft, ist es eher in
der Lage auf der biologischen Ebene komplexe Ideen zu vermitteln. Ich will, dass meine Arbeiten auch so funktionieren.
Mit „neurologischem Fitnessstudio“ meine ich, dass Kunst
Geist, Bewusstsein und Gefühle des Betrachters trainieren
kann. Kunst kann kaum Einfluss auf die materielle Welt nehmen, aber ich glaube dass sie nachhaltig Geist und Denken
der Menschen verändern kann und ihr Verhältnis zur äußeren Welt.
Wie kamst du dazu mit Computern zu arbeiten?
Für mich sind Computer zur Zeit einfach ein wichtiges Werkzeug und kulturelles Phänomen. Das grundlegende Material
meiner Arbeit ist Verhalten, also „weiches“ Material. Um dieses Material herum sind meine Live-Simulationen organisiert. Es geht in ihnen nicht um materielle Aspekte der Installation, auch nicht um Computeranimation, sondern um den
Versuch Verhalten zu beobachten, damit zu spielen und es zu
gestalten. Die ganze Apparatur der
Computersimulation erlaubt es einfach
Verhalten schneller, einfacher, günstiger
und vielfältiger zu komponieren. Vielleicht werde ich in zehn Jahren, wenn
synthetische Biologie einfacher und billiger zu haben ist, mit echten Organismen arbeiten.
In der Kunst der 1980er hat der Begriff der
Your work was once described as “playing in
a neuro-g ym”. Can you relate to that image?
Yes, because I created that phrase
[laughs]. My favorite artworks impose
an immediate feeling or state in me.
Even if the art contains complex ideas and perspectives, the force of that
sensation becomes a portal into those
perspectives. An artwork that invents a bodily feeling has a greater
biological capacity to transmit complex ideas. I want my works to function that way too. The idea of the
“neurological gym” implies that art
can exercise a viewer’s mind, exercise
pathways of feelings. It’s very hard
for art to change the material world,
but I think it can effectively change
people’s minds, refactoring their relationship to that world.
How did you end up working with computer
technolog y?
Computers are simply a relevant tool
and cultural motif for me at this moment. The basic material I am working with is behavior, which is a soft
material. That’s what my live simulations are organized around. They’re
not about the materiality of the installation, they’re not about computer animation; they’re about trying to observe, play with, and sculpt behavior.
The apparatus of the computer simulation just makes composing with behavior quicker, easier, cheaper, and
more varied. Maybe ten years from
now, when synthetic biology becomes
affordable and accessible to artists, I
will work with real organisms.
There was a lot of confusion around the term
“simulation” in the art of the 1980s. Jean
Baudrillard was quoted enthusiastically by
many artists, until the French philosopher
declared that it was all a misunderstanding.
How do you define simulation in your work?
For me, simulation means compressing the full-spectrum dynamics of life
into a closed system in order to exam-
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„Simulation“ viel Verwirrung gestiftet. Künstler zitierten begeistert Jean
schnitten – unseren E-Mails, dem Hirshhorn Museum, unseBaudrillard, bis der Philosoph selbst erklärte, dass es sich um ein Missren Familien, unserem Herzschlag, den Bewohnern von
verständnis handle. Wie definierst du Simulation in deiner Arbeit?
Washington, DC. Ein Mensch zu sein heißt, kleine MikroSimulation heißt für mich, die volle Bandbreite der unterAusschnitte der Wirklichkeit zu simulieren um sich zurecht
zu finden und dann zur nächsten Simulation zu wechseln.
schiedlichsten Dynamiken des Lebens in ein geschlossenes
Wenn man dieser natürlichen GegeSystem zu packen um einen Teil von
ihnen anschaulich erforschen zu könbenheit, dass Realität immer gefiltert
ist, im Kontext der Kunst eine Form
nen. In einer Simulation legt man eine
IAN CHENG, geboren 1984 in Los Angeund einen Namen gibt, kann man sie
Reihe von Regeln und Prinzipien fest
les. Lebt in New York. AUSSTELLUNbewusst anerkennen und damit spieund überlässt es ihnen dann, sich zu
GEN: Liverpool Biennial (kommenden
entfalten. Bisher beruhte die Kritik an
Sommer), Migros Museum, Zürich (solo);
len.
Simulationen auf der Unterscheidung
Suspended Animation, Hirshhorn Museum,
Kannst du ein Beispiel aus dem Leben nenzwischen einer simulierten, nichtWashington DC (2016); Emissary Forks
nen?
At Perfection, Pilar Corrias, London (solo);
Wenn ich mit meinem Corgi spiele, bin
authentischen Welt und einer realen,
Co-Workers, Musee d’Art Moderne de la
ich in einer komplett simulierten Zone.
authentischen Welt. Ich hasse diese
Ville de Paris / Bétonsalon, Paris; EmissaIch denke nicht mehr an meine Ängste
Unterscheidung. Sie ist grundfalsch,
oder Stress, und ich hoffe, dass mein
schließlich kann der Mensch eh nie
ry in the Squat of Gods, Fondazione
Hund sich auch nicht mehr um Futter,
wirklich an den kompletten Strom der
Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (solo);
Spielzeug oder andere Menschen kümRealität andocken. Um überhaupt zu
Open Source, Max Hetzler, Berlin; Real
funktionieren, muss er Realität immer
Humans, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (solo, mit
mert. Es gibt dieses Zitat von Philip
simulieren und das Leben in kuratierte
Wu Tsang, Jordan Wolfson) (2015); Taipei
K. Dick: „Die Realität ist das, was
Ausschnitte einteilen, sonst würde sein
Biennial; Triennale Di Milano (2014);
nicht verschwindet, wenn man aufhört
sensorischer Apparat kollabieren.
Baby Feat. Bali, Standard (Oslo), Oslo
daran zu glauben.“ Ich glaube das trifft
Schau’ uns an: Wir führen ein Inter(solo); Lyon Biennial; ProBio, Expo1,
es wirklich. Man kann nur jeweils ein
MoMA PS1, New York (2013). VERkleines Stück Realität auf einmal beview, sind also tief verbunden mit der
Gegenwart dieses Gesprächs. GleichTRETEN VON: Pilar Corrias, London;
greifen, selbst wenn sie sich objektiv
Standard (Oslo), Oslo; Formalist Sidewalk
auf noch ganz anderen Wellenlängen
zeitig sind wir von so vielen anderen
Poetry Club, Miami
abspielt, denen man keine AufmerkAspekten der Realität komplett abge-
E
ine a slice of those dynamics with
greater clarity. In a simulation, you
artificially establish a set of rules and
principles, but then allow those principles to play out. Previous arguments
against simulation were based on the
idea that there is a simulated inauthentic world versus a real authentic world.
I hate this distinction. It’s really false,
because the human mind can never
really connect to the full “fire hose” of
reality. Instead, it must simulate reality
as curated slices of life in order to
function without having a sensory
meltdown. Look at us: we are in the
process of an interview right now, so
we are deeply connected to this moment of conversation. But we are
completely disconnected from so
many other aspects of reality in this
moment – our email, the Hirshhorn
Museum, our families, our heartbeat,
the citizens of Washington DC. To be
human is to simulate little micro-slices of reality before jumping to the
next simulation. Giving this a form
and a name within the context of art is
a way to deliberately appreciate and
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IAN CHENG, born 1984 in Los Angeles, lives in New York. EXHIBITIONS:
Liverpool Biennial (forthcoming), Migros
Museum, Zurich (solo); Suspended Animation, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC
(2016); Emissary Forks At Perfection, Pilar Corrias, London (solo); Co-Workers,
Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris /
Bétonsalon, Paris; Emissary in the Squat of
Gods, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (solo); Open Source, Max Hetzler,
Berlin; Real Humans, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (solo, with Wu Tsang, Jordan Wolfson)
(2015); Taipei Biennial; Triennale Di Milano (2014); Baby Feat. Bali, Standard
(Oslo), Oslo (solo); Lyon Biennial; ProBio,
Expo1, MoMA PS1, New York (2013).
REPRESENTED BY: Pilar Corrias,
London; Standard (Oslo), Oslo; Formalist
Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami
play with this natural fact of filtering
reality.
Can you give an example from real life?
When I play with my Corgi dog, it’s a
completely simulated zone. I stop
thinking about all my anxiety and
stress, and I’d like to think that my
dog ignores food, toys, and other people too. There’s this Philip K. Dick
quote: “Reality is that which, when
you stop believing in it, doesn’t go
away.” I think it’s really true. You can
only touch upon a little bit of reality at
a time, even as it objectively continues
on wavelengths you cannot or choose
not to give attention to. The best we
can do evolutionarily is to become
better at managing which simulation
our mind is playing within; which
simulation is best suited for dealing
with the external reality at hand.
One important subject in the creation of digital identities is the notion of the body. Digital
bodies are fluid, ethereal, they don’t age, they
seem to have no limits. But when you switch
off the power, the screen goes black.
I took a DNA test: you spit in this tube,
send it to California, and they tell you
what your DNA implies. They told me
I have a 49% chance of Alzheimer’s after age 75, which is quite high. The average American has something like a
17% chance. When you have Alzheimer’s, your mind erodes but your body
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samkeit schenken kann oder will. Das Beste, was wir für unsere Evolution tun können ist mehr Kontrolle über die Simulation zu gewinnen, in der wir gerade sind; und die Simulation
zu wählen, die es uns am ehesten erlaubt mit der jeweiligen
äußeren Realität zurechtzukommen.
Ein wichtiges Thema in der Konstruktion digitaler Identitäten ist das
Konzept des Körpers. Digitale Körper sind fluid und flüchtig, sie altern
nicht, sie scheinen keine Grenzen zu haben. Aber sobald man den Strom
abschaltet, ist der Bildschirm schwarz.
Ich habe einen DNA-Test gemacht: Man spuckt in so ein
Röhrchen, schickt es nach Kalifornien, und im Gegenzug er-
E
remains completely intact. My body
will still be me – it will look like me –
but because of the decay of the mind
and the decay of the continuity of who
I think I am, who I thought I was, and
who I am going to be, and my relation
to people, my identity will be lost. It
doesn’t matter that my body is still
around; I am not here, the lights are off.
It seems, then, that the thing we value
is not the body of a person, it is the continuity of a person.
So the physical body is overrated?
… or continuity is underrated. Remembering your past, knowing the
link between the past and the present,
fährst du, was deine DNA über dich aussagt. Ich erfuhr dadurch, dass ich eine 49-prozentige Wahrscheinlichkeit habe,
ab einem Alter von 75 an Alzheimer zu erkranken, was ziemlich hoch ist. Bei einem durchschnittlichen Amerikaner sind
es ungefähr 17 Prozent. Bei Alzheimer erodiert das Gehirn,
aber der Körper bleibt völlig intakt. Mein Körper wird immer
noch aussehen wie ich, aber weil sich mein Gehirn zersetzt
und damit die Kontinuität meiner Auffassung davon, wer ich
bin, wer ich war und wer ich sein werde, und auch mein Verhältnis zu anderen, wird meine Identität verschwinden. Es ist
egal, dass der Körper noch da ist. Ich bin nicht da, die Lichter
and – beyond that – imagining your
future. When you look at a photo of
yourself as a child, not a single atom in
your body in that photo exists anymore. Physiologically and materially,
that’s a whole other person. All those
cells – skin cells, internal cells, brain
cells – are gone, dead, renewed. But
we know there is a link between that
childhood organism and the one you
are now; there is continuity. I think
maybe that’s the perspective that will
get us beyond moral arguments
against future modifications of the
body, the mind, and of networking
with the mind. If the focus becomes
about an appreciation for continuity,
the future suddenly seems a lot less
about clichéd visions of dystopia or
utopia.
In the case of the main figure in Emissary in
the Squat of Gods (2015), how did you go
about developing her behavior?
The work contains almost 50 characters. She is the main protagonist, but
also part of a larger community. All
the other characters have a very basic
intelligence that is inspired by the
Sims, which was one of the first videogames to develop the idea that intelligence is not just in your head; it’s distributed into the objects in your
Still aus / from Something Thinking of You, 2015, Live-Simulation und Story, Ton, Dauer unbegrenzt / Live simulation and story, sound, infinite duration
Courtesy of the artist, Pilar Corrias Gallery, Standard (Oslo)
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sind aus. Es scheint, als wäre es nicht der Körper, der den
Wert einer Person ausmacht, sondern ihre Kontinuität.
Der Körper ist also überbewertet?
… oder die Kontinuität unterbewertet. Sich an die Vergangenheit zu erinnern, zu wissen wie sie mit der Gegenwart in
Verbindung steht und sich noch dazu die eigene Zukunft vorzustellen. Wenn du dir ein Foto von dir als Kind anschaust,
dann ist kein einziges Atom des Körpers auf diesem Foto
mehr existent. Physiologisch und materiell ist die Person auf
dem Foto eine komplett andere. All diese Zellen – Hautzellen, innere Zellen, Gehirnzellen – sind weg, tot, ersetzt. Aber
wir wissen, dass es eine Verbindung gibt zwischen diesem
Kinderkörper und dem Organismus, der wir jetzt sind. Da ist
eine Kontinuität. Vielleicht kann uns diese Perspektive helfen, moralische Argumente hinter uns zu lassen, wenn es um
zukünftige Veränderungen des Körpers, des Geistes und dessen Vernetzung geht. Wenn man den Fokus auf Kontinuität
als Wert legt, erscheint die Zukunft plötzlich viel weniger von
dystopischen und utopischen Klischees verstellt.
Schauen wir uns ein Beispiel an: Wie hast du die Verhaltensweisen der
Hauptfigur in „Emissary in the Squat of Gods“ (2015) entwickelt?
In der Arbeit gibt es fast 50 Figuren. Die Emissärin ist Hauptprotagonistin, aber auch Teil einer größeren Community.
Alle anderen Figuren basieren auf einer sehr einfachen Intelligenz, die vom Videospiel „The Sims“ inspiriert ist – eins der
ersten Spiele, das mit dem Konzept einer Intelligenz arbeitete, die nicht nur im Kopf angesiedelt ist, sondern auch in den
umliegenden Objekten. Intelligenz beruht hier auf einer Be-
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environment. Intelligence arises out
of a relationship with your context
and its changing affordances, not out
of a platonic ideal of inner smartness.
From the perspective of an AI character, it has a set of needs, like hunger,
being social, organizing the environment, and maintaining energy levels.
How do basic needs work for a digital character in your simulation?
All the objects in the environment,
including other characters, contain
advertisements that announce the
fulfillment of a need. If I look at a
water bottle, it will say: “Drink me, if
you are thirsty!” All the characters in
this simulated community generate a
kind of emergent crowd intelligence.
In contrast, the emissary character
sits outside of this AI model. Instead
of having needs and looking for advertisements, she has narrative goals.
Her goal might be to climb to the top
of a mountain, acquire a bucket, put
ash in it, go talk to the shaman. Those
goals are a way of simulating the idea
of consciousness as an ability to imagine yourself narratively in the fu-
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ziehung mit dem Kontext und seinen sich verändernden Anforderungen, nicht auf einem platonischen Ideal innerer
Klugheit. Eine KI-Figur hat eine Reihe von Bedürfnissen wie
Hunger, Gesellschaft, die Gestaltung ihrer Umwelt und das
Aufrechterhalten ihres Energielevels.
Wie funktionieren Grundbedürfnisse bei einer digitalen Figur?
Alle Objekte in der Umgebung, auch die Figuren, tragen Botschaften mit sich, die jeder anderen Figur eine Befriedigung
ihrer Bedürfnisse anbietet. Wenn ich eine Wasserflasche sehe,
sagt sie: „Trink mich, wenn du Durst hast!“ Alle Figuren in
dieser simulierten Gemeinschaft bilden eine Art Gruppenintelligenz aus, die mit der Zeit zunimmt. Die Emissärin steht
dagegen außerhalb des KI-Modells. Statt Bedürfnisse zu haben, für die sie Botschaften sucht, sind ihre Ziele erzählerischer Natur: auf einen Berggipfel steigen, einen Eimer kaufen, einen Schamanen aufsuchen. Diese Ziele simulieren ein
Bewusstsein im Sinne eines Vermögens sich selbst narrativ in
der Zukunft zu entwerfen, sobald man einem neuen Problem
gegenüber steht. Weil sich aber die anderen KIs in ihrer
Community reaktiv verhalten, nach ihren impulsiven Bedürfnissen, können sie die Emissärin von der Erfüllung ihrer Ziele abbringen. Es geht darum wie die beiden Kräfte sich gegenseitig formen und darum, wer gewinnt – wer sich unter
welchen Bedingungen besser anpassen kann. Die Live-Simulation bietet eine Einsicht in diesen immerwährenden Prozess.
In deinen virtuellen Landschaften kollidieren zwei Ebenen kognitiver
Evolution. Ziehst du auch eine Parallele zwischen der Geschichte der
ture, when you face a new problem.
But because all the other AIs in her
little virtual community behave reactively, based on their impulsive
needs, they can distract the emissary
from fulfilling her goals. The work is
about these two forces sculpting each
other and seeing which one wins;
which one is more adaptive under
various conditions.
In your virtual landscape, two stages of cognitive evolution collide. Do you also create a
parallel between the history of cognition and
the emergent consciousness of machines?
If machine intelligence is built right,
it necessarily means there is a distance: we can never really know what
or how machines are thinking, just as
we can never really know what a dog
is thinking. My favorite book, Julian
Jaynes’s The Origins of Consciousness in
the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,
suggests that ancient humans didn’t
have the consciousness app. They
couldn’t imagine into the future narratively, and instead heard vocal hallucinations that told them what to do
in situations that habit or life experi-
ence had no reference for. Imagine a
world where everyone in your community basically behaves like a schizophrenic talking to voices. It sounds
like a hellish place to live. But back
then, it was as normal as answering
email is to us. And I think the same
will happen in the future, with artificial intelligences communicating
with each other, our relationship
with AIs, and our unfolding relationship to ourselves. It’s actually hard to
imagine how alien we will become
from our 2016 selves.
In science fiction, artificial intelligence often
goes rogue. How far would you go in the creation of artificial intelligence?
One of my dream projects is to collaborate with an artificial intelligence,
and not just to say, “This work is by
Ian,” but to say, “This work is by us:
Ian and Sally the AI.” And looking at
this work, you would understand that
it is indeed a collaboration of equivalent status, the way that Fischli/Weiss
are collaborators or, John and Paul, or
Jobs and Wozniak. You would understand that the machine has the same
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Kognition und dem erwachenden Bewusstsein von Maschinen?
Wenn künstliche Intelligenz richtig gemacht ist, muss es notwendigerweise eine Distanz geben: Wir können niemals
wirklich wissen, was oder wie Maschinen denken, wie wir
auch nie wirklich wissen werden, was ein Hund denkt. In
meinem Lieblingsbuch, „Der Ursprung des Bewusstseins“
von Julian Jaynes, heißt es, dass die Menschen der Frühzeit
die Bewusstseins-App nicht hatten. Sie waren nicht in der
Lage sich die Zukunft narrativ auszumalen, stattdessen hörten sie halluzinierte Stimmen, die ihnen sagten, was zu tun
war, wenn sie in Situationen kamen, für die sie keine Vorlage
in der Gewohnheit oder Lebenserfahrung hatten. Stell’ dir
eine Welt vor, wo sich jeder in deiner Nähe im Prinzip wie ein
Schizophrener verhält und mit Stimmen spricht. Das klingt
wie ein höllischer Ort zum Leben. Aber damals war es so
normal wie für uns das Beantworten einer E-Mail. Und ich
glaube, das Gleiche wird in Zukunft passieren, wenn künstliche Intelligenzen miteinander kommunizieren und wir mit
ihnen. Das wird auch unser Selbstverhältnis verändern. Es ist
wirklich schwer sich vorzustellen wie weit wir uns dann von
unserem 2016er-Selbst entfremdet haben werden.
In der Science Fiction wird die künstliche Intelligenz oft bösartig. Wie
weit würdest du bei der Schaffung künstlicher Intelligenz gehen?
Eines meiner Traum-Projekte ist mit einer künstlichen Intelligenz zu kollaborieren, und zwar nicht einfach nur, dass man
sagt: „Diese Arbeit ist von Ian“, sondern zum Beispiel: „Diese
Arbeit ist von uns: Ian und der KI Sally“. Und man würde der
Arbeit ansehen, dass es sich tatsächlich um eine Zusammenarbeit auf Augenhöhe handelt, so wie bei Fischli/Weiss oder
creative status in making something
as the human. It’s a dream of mine to
reach that level: not only in production, but in a world where we as viewers would recognize the legitimacy of
this status.
Will virtual reality eventually make the physical body obsolete?
I think virtual reality will have the
opposite effect: it will give us a deeper appreciation for physical reality
and for the physical body; an appreciation for how truly weird it is, how
we are already disembodied from it,
how meaningless it is without context
or life scripts. When I brush my
teeth, I am not thinking of the physical sensation of brushing my teeth.
Imagine how tedious it would be to
think about each step you walk. Virtual reality forces us to consciously
think about walking again, or simple
gestures like coordinating your hand
to touch your teeth. Over time, VR
will allow us to more fully understand the virtual reality our biological senses and sensory processing al-
John und Paul. Man würde erkennen, dass der Maschine als
Entwickler der gleiche Status zukommt wie dem Menschen.
Das zu erreichen, wäre für mich ein Traum: dass man der
Maschine diese Legitimität zuspricht, nicht nur in der Produktion, sondern auch als Betrachter.
Wird die virtuelle Realität den Körper irgendwann obsolet machen?
Ich glaube, dass die virtuelle Realität den umgekehrten Effekt
haben wird: Sie wird uns zu einem tieferen Verständnis für
die physische Realität und den physischen Körper verhelfen;
ein Verständnis dafür, wie seltsam er ist, wie sehr wir schon
von ihm getrennt sind, wie bedeutungslos er ohne Kontext
oder Lebensentwürfe ist. Wenn ich meine Zähne putze, denke ich nicht an die physische Empfindung des Zähneputzens.
Stell’ dir vor, wie mühsam es wäre, beim Gehen über jeden
Schritt nachzudenken. Virtuelle Realität zwingt uns, wieder
bewusst über das Gehen nachzudenken oder über einfache
Gesten wie das Koordinieren der Hand, wenn man die eigenen Zähne berührt. Mit der Zeit wird VR uns erlauben, die
virtuelle Realität besser zu verstehen, der wir mit unseren biologischen Sinnen und der Verarbeitung der Sinnesdaten eh
schon unterworfen sind. Sie wird einen schnelleren, direkteren und intelligenteren Weg bieten, den ganzen Problemen zu
begegnen, die daraus entstehen, dass wir in einer wirklich
schrägen Welt leben.
Gianni Jetzer ist freier Kurator, Kritiker und arbeitet als Curator-atlarge am Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington
DC. Er lebt in New York.
ready submit us to. It will offer a
quicker, faster, and more agile way to
manipulate all the problems that
come from living in such an objectively weird world.
Gianni Jetzer is an independent curator and
critic as well as curator at large at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in
Washington DC. He lives in New York.
10 6
Aus dem Amerikanischen von Kolja Reichert
Port r a i t
Port r a i t
D
Courtesy of the artist, Pilar Corrias Gallery, Standard (Oslo) ; Photo: Achim Kukulies
Os dolorer aeperiti atio. Nam velitiis voluptaes non rem reptatiate voluptatur si delia nosaerum deriam ent.
Installationsansicht / Installation view “Real Humans – Ian Cheng, Wu Tsang, Jordan Wolfson”, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2015
Still aus / from Something Thinking of You, 2015, Live-Simulation und Story, Ton, Dauer unbegrenzt / Live simulation and story, sound, infinite duration
THE CYBORG ANTHROPOLOGIST: IAN CHENG ON HIS SENTIENT
ARTWORKS
Ian Cheng, Emissary in the Squat of Gods (still), 2015, live simulation and story.
COURTESY THE ARITST
Last February, shortly after the opening of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden’s show of recent computer-generated art, called “Suspended Animation,” Ian
Cheng received an urgent text message. Cheng’s work in the show, Emissary in the
Squat of Gods (2015), is about a prehistoric girl trying to decide how to respond to the
threat of a volcanic eruption. But there was a problem—the girl had been idling and
staring at an ash particle for two hours. Was that supposed to happen?
It was, and it wasn’t. Cheng makes what he calls “live simulations,” and each one, he
says, is something like “a video game that plays itself.” He doesn’t know what will
happen in his works because they are infinitely mutating, never finished, and quite
literally evolving. Cheng may not have intended for the girl to get stuck for two hours,
but if she did that, he accepted it. The girl’s actions were no longer up to him. The
work wasn’t under his control anymore.
“I can’t fully hone in on the emotion that it should capture because I honestly don’t
know what it’s going to do,” Cheng told me on a chilly February day in his small, oneroom office in New York’s Chinatown. “You can resolve that into something really
elegant or beautiful. But it is, in fact, in a feeling of confusion.”
Describing Cheng’s simulations can be a challenge. The characters in them look like
computerized versions of real-life animals and humans, but, because Cheng is working
with a video-game engine that keeps creating new combinations, the figures can
smash into each other and break into overlapping geometric planes. Though what the
work will do is left up to chance, Cheng has a narrative in mind before he starts
working, and his works loosely follow it.
When I met him, Cheng had just returned from Zurich, where he had opened a solo
show at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, and he was still jetlagged. Cheng
had also recently overseen the installation of his simulation at the Hirshhorn, and
another work of his had just gone on display in MOCA Cleveland’s “Stranger,” which
surveys artists who depict humans in odd, new ways. All three shows opened in the
past three months, and all speak to the way Cheng creates scenarios in which humans
have to rethink their relationship to technology. What if software updates and new
models aren’t the only way technology is evolving? What if technology is evolving us,
rather than the other way around?
Ian Cheng’s Emissary Forks at Perfection (2015–16), as installed at the Migros Museum
für Gegenwartskunst, 2016.
NICOLAS DUC
In his studio, Cheng had a white desk with two computer monitors and a flat-screen
television. He wore all black. The only object that stuck out in the room was a copy of
Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,
Cheng’s favorite book. Most of Cheng’s work happens in the computer, opening what
seems to be a highly organized space into something random and uncharted. Raphael
Gygax, the curator of Cheng’s Migros Museum show, said that this randomness even
extends to how Cheng’s work is displayed. “As soon as you have technology as a
partner at your side, unforeseen things can happen,” he wrote in an email. “Loss of
energy, loss of Wi-Fi signals, updates, conversion problems. A new set of problems—
but nothing that can’t be resolved.”
When he was growing up in Los Angeles, Cheng’s mother took him movie-hopping on
Saturdays. They sometimes saw six and a half movies in one day. After he graduated
from UC Berkeley in 2006 with a dual degree in art and cognitive science, he worked at
Industrial Light & Magic, which has done special effects for the Star Wars and
Transformers movies. Then, after a year of doing visual effects, he went back to school
and received an M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2009. “It’s a little bit weird because
I love movies, and I sometimes love movies more than I love art,” Cheng (who has also
written speculative fiction based on the structure of Game of Thrones) said.
Ian Cheng, Thousand Islands Thousand Laws, 2013, live
simulation.
COURTESY THE ARTIST
But Cheng also mourned the fact that films have fixed narratives—in a theater, you
can’t change how they’ll play out. Video games, he explained, put narratives in the
hands of players. Cheng loves The Sims, a computer game in which the player controls
a person and guides him or her through life. The genius of The Sims, Cheng said, is
“this idea that intelligence is not just in your head. It’s distributed between you and all
the objects and other people that are around you,” so by having a Sim interact with an
environment, players create stories. In a sense, Cheng’s work is movies plus video
games: they can be watched like a film, but the film progresses seemingly through its
own willpower.
Gianni Jetzer, the curator of “Suspended Animation,” compared Cheng’s simulations to
bird-watching. “It’s not really a Frankenstein moment where the figures walk
offscreen,” Jetzer said, but viewers come to see the live simulations “as a form of
reality. That’s an important part of Ian Cheng’s work—that you really get into the skin
of a cyborg anthropologist, that you watch this strange digital tribe, which reflects the
history of human evolution, basically.”
For instance, in his simulation Thousand Islands Thousand Laws (2013), an urban
soldier with a gun, who is appropriated from a real video game, stands in a white
landscape that also has birds and plants. The birds keep attacking the soldier,
something Cheng never even anticipated. The soldier, the birds, the plants, “They each
have their own laws,” Cheng said, “but in overlaying them, the idea was that some kind
of implicit law would emerge in how they organize themselves, how they negotiate
being together with conflicting scripts.”
Since then, Cheng’s narratives have become more intricate—he’s now conceiving the
third work in a trilogy of simulations about cognitive evolution. The trilogy begins in the
distant past and ends in the far future, in a scenario that Cheng described as an
“abstract” ecology that is “definitely not human.”
The first, Emissary in the Squat of Gods, the one in “Suspended Animation,” is set in
prehistoric times and follows a shaman who gets hit on the head after an earthquake.
The seismic shift is the result of a volcano, but the shaman doesn’t know it yet—he’s
never seen an eruption. Should he uproot the community or not? He and his apprentice
disagree. “It’s precisely in this moment where it’s the threat, and not the actual
disaster, that humans find the most anxiety-provoking and the most stressful,” Cheng
said. “You don’t actually know which way to go. It’s an uncertain moment, and so the
shaman’s bias is roughly toward wanting to stay, and then the emissary apprentice
character’s bias is toward wanting to convince everyone to leave.”
Ian Cheng, Emissary Forks at Perfection (still), 2015, live simulation.
COURTESY THE ARTIST
In the semi-sequel Emissary Forks at Perfection (2015), which is now on view at the
Migros Museum, a dog character named the Shiba Emissary, a descendant from the
first simulation, appears 3,000 years later. The landscape is the same, but now it’s
populated by artificial animals that resurrect a dead celebrity from the 21st century.
The dog, Cheng said, is “a means of talking about where consciousness can go,
without eradicating powerful emotions like fear and anxiety, which can be very useful.”
(The artist is currently working on an app for the Serpentine Galleries called Bad Corgi,
in which users play as a dog herding sheep.)
Cheng has been known to describe his work as a “neurological gym,” and Jetzer said
that it’s this quality of Cheng’s work that intrigues him. “His work makes people more
fit, more adept to dealing with digital relations,” Jetzer said.
A large part of Cheng’s Migros Museum show is devoted to a new installation that uses
Google’s Project Tango devices, which can sense where a user is in a room. Museum
visitors can use the tablets to follow the Shiba Emissary. The dog will say “Follow me”
to viewers, and, once viewers move close to it, the dog will make the clicking noise
animal trainers make to reinforce good behavior. “It’s a virtual dog quite literally forcing
your physical behavior to become different,” Cheng explained. In other words, as he
later clarified, “You are its pet.”
HERMETIC ENGINEERING: THE ART OF IAN CHENG by Ben Vickers
March 2016
Ian Cheng, Emissary in the Squat of Gods, 2015, live simulation, sound, indefinite duration.
Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are
nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these
machines are eminently portable, mobile—a matter of immense human pain in Detroit
and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque.
Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.
—Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985)
UNKNOWABLE SIGILS litter the landscape. This is the territory of an ancient
community, a culture that drifts in a state of preconsciousness, the shamanic schizoid
oblivion that was once the human condition. In Ian Cheng’s Emissary in the Squat of
Gods, 2015—an animated simulation that unfolds stochastically, not according to the
intent of an author but to the ramifying whims of code, a story with events but no
definitive narrative and no predetermined end—everyone hears voices. Thought, in
Cheng’s simulated world, takes the bifurcated form theorized by psychologist and
1970s cult figure Julian Jaynes, who argued that one-half of the human mind once
spoke to the other in auditory hallucinations, giving rise to the concept of gods. These
hallucinations guide the faltering bodies of the populace. It’s here that the first stage of
an emissary’s special diplomatic mission to tame and normalize an alien world—a saga
too sprawling to be contained in Emissary in the Squat of Gods alone—begins to
unfold.
Before attempting to delve further into the cognitive planes in which Cheng’s selfspawning work lives and breathes, it’s necessary to set forth a set of preliminary
concepts and assumptions and to describe technologies at once arcane and
deterministic. While by no means exhaustive, and necessarily tailored to this text, this
list highlights the key terms:
Emergence: Symptomatic of complex, almost unknowable systems, emergence is a
result of simple rules and behavioral models interacting over time, giving rise to a nearinfinite set of possible configurations and conditions.
Animalism: The theory that personal identity is a function of biology, and possessed by
all animals, human and nonhuman alike.
Machine reinforcement learning: An evolutionary mutation in thought flowing from our
development of the ability to recognize patterns; among scientists who work on
artificial intelligence, the term is used to describe the process by which a series of
algorithms becomes capable of improving a model by digesting and responding to the
examples fed into it.
Slippery DNA: The movement of one strand of DNA relative to another, resulting in a
scrambling of code, an error that, according to researchers, is “amplified” in future
generations. Perhaps most clearly evidenced in the evolution of Canidae or, as we have
come to know them, dogs.
iPhones and birds’ nests: “If there is an ethic, it is that [the] iPhone is as natural as a
bird’s nest, just wrapped in a consensual social reality that allows us to not see the
iPhone as a monstrous composite of rare earth material, which it also is.”1
Attempting to unpack the way in which these methods, ways of seeing, and
expressions of a world are layered, integrated, and deployed in Cheng’s complex
simulated environments would be a fool’s errand, particularly if one wishes to build a
meaningful relationship with this world’s inhabitants. The work’s emergent properties
are impossible to witness in their entirety. A simulation is not merely a representation,
or a predetermined symbolic path. It just is.
These markers of thought give a particular and inimitable texture to the encounter with
these living simulations, the habitat-forming ecologies initiated by Cheng. The artist
intentionally constructs these habitats with an anthropocentric sense of scale, time,
and space, so as to ease viewers’ cognitive load, acknowledging that “nature is often
too fast, too slow, too big, too small for us. We desire a live simulation at scale with
human space-time.” Over the course of the past few years, he has produced a
sequence of increasingly sophisticated live simulations, and in 2015 he debuted the
first two installments of a three-part series “dedicated to the history of cognitive
evolution, past and future.”
In Emissary Forks at Perfection, 2015, on view in Cheng’s current exhibition at the
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, a Shiba Inu—that ancient and muchbeloved breed of dog—performs the role of Emissary, which should not be
conceptualized as anything like a character or identity that persists across time, but is
perhaps better construed as a “ruleset.” Thirty centuries have passed since a volcanic
eruption eviscerated the landscape, leaving in its wake the geologic devastation writ
large in Emissary in the Squat of Gods. Now the ecological paradise that has formed in
the crater of the volcano serves as the fertile terrain for an artificial intelligence named
Talus Twenty Nine, and for the Shiba Inu that Talus breeds continuously—a tranquility
interrupted only by the resurrection of a twenty-first-century celebrity. As described
by Cheng, these are the necessary starting ingredients for an improvised “soup,” the
recipe for all the dynamics and relationships that are set to emerge—a fluidity that is
apparent at the Migros Museum, where a tablet-based version of Forks permits visitors
to enter and walk around in the simulation.
But more aptly than the kitchen, we might picture an ancient laboratory of
technoculture. The prosaically named Unity games engine, conceived very much
within the confines of our existing prosaic reality, developed by the company Unity
Technologies as a means to “democratize games development,”makes available an
easily accessible software platform capable of rendering an infinite number of forms
and imbuing each with its own specific ruleset. These rule-bound forms may be
iterated, scripted, molded, and ultimately released by developers as games or as more
ambiguous types of cultural production. It should be understood that Cheng’s practice
is more in line with the alchemical tradition (the unpublished backstory of Newton’s
historic discoveries is resonant here), rather than a broken branch from later forms of
magical thinking, such as chemistry or physics, the latter of which forgoes gold and
searches instead for a rationalized “God particle.” Transmuting and tinkering with base
forms, Cheng’s relationship to that which is simulated is contingent on the behavioral
change he observes in matter, defying any precisely quantified metric, rewriting from
the observed effects of his lines of code—unpredictable reagents for the formation of
the Shiba Inu’s relationship to its world, catalysts for the disruptions induced in the
landscape by an “atavistic human.”2
Shiba Emissary, born into a state of preconsciousness, is forking herself, her
consciousness is rising, and each fork accelerates the potential to improve on
perfection—the perfection of the Shiba’s prestigious lineage. The arrival in the
landscape of the anomalous twenty-first-century celebrity exacerbates the separation
anxiety endemic to the breed, and escalates the ongoing slippage caused by the
continual forking, executed each time without fear of death. Forking happens in nature,
in the formation of multiverses; “writers simulate a thousand forking worlds on the
draft[ed] page.”3 It also happens in software development, millions of developers
working simultaneously to branch existing code for new purposes, forking, iterating,
and merging, each improvement contributing to an unseen planetary-scale network, a
constantly mutating system on which we all rely and feed daily. While this example—
this network—represents some semblance of stability, or at least a form that may be
conceptualized as determinate in a given instant, a more apt example for
understanding the stabilizing force of forks would be the recent split in the core
development team responsible for maintaining the entire codebase on which Bitcoin
thrives and survives. A fork advocating for an increase in the blockchain size, which
limits the number of transactions that can be processed by the network at a given
time, was created in response to fears that failing to do so would lead to Bitcoin’s
demise. The rift resulting from this divergent evolution to the core software, while
striving for sustainability, has engendered uncertainty that continues to threaten a
market cap of $5,902,942,520.
Without consensus or even consent, though, a fork can be painful, expensive for social
cohesion. It often takes the form of an ideological split in a vision of the future that
software engineers are seeking to produce through the systems they build, big or
small. If one fork is capable of garnering enough support, it can become dominant and
occlude all alternatives, with the productive energy being rechanneled in a new
direction. The original future is obliterated.
Cheng is acutely aware of this constant flux, stating: “When a local optimal state is
reached, nature doesn’t idealize it, she forks it.” In this sense, Shiba Emissary and
Talus Twenty Nine have already produced gold, simply by being vectors of
indeterminacy. Cheng’s emulation of Heraclitean instability is an intentional break from
perfection, a collapsing of ideal forms into mutations that might be capable of
producing a genuine unknown, capable of generating the Cthulhus of a simulated
world.
Words of warning: One should step cautiously into this kind of knowledge work and its
corresponding laboratories, in which live simulations are incubated with atavism in
mind. This is Gnostic thinking, conscious of the potential of thought forms, or their
scientific contemporary, the mirror neuron, to transmit mutations of the self,
acknowledging we inhabit a world where ants coordinate using pheromones and
humans coordinate according to the myths and stories we tell. That the hermetic
practice of thought forms may be transposed so smoothly into this hard-coded
environment is a testament to the emergent quality of the world that Cheng scripts.
Simulations were supposedly engineered into existence with the intention of making
sense of the world or seeking some as-yet undiscovered truth, in order to study in
confined quarters various systems and their contingencies. But Cheng’s live
simulations seem to take on an entirely different intentionality, one that is mindful of
the potential for “a sudden pattern of feelings [to] grow inside you, with or without
you,” a recognition of interspecies dependence, and a vocabulary of cognitive gestures
for coping with an all-pervasive global weirding. They conjure a crack through which
various thought forms may be capable of escape, infection, or symbiotic grafting with
one’s own perception of reality.
As with the creation of all new techniques that provide godlike abilities, that rekindle
our ancient Jaynesian status as beings with gods in our own minds, unknown
consequences abound: the onset of genome editing, embodied simulation, AI threats
of sentience, the rising Ubers of big biotech, immortality.
By activating the atavistic, Emissary performs a preemptive strike on the cultural
landscape of everything you and I think we know. What we are offered is a humble
simulated rehearsal that acts in anticipation of the significant biological upheaval that
awaits us. Within this future-as-prologue, there are practices, methods, and reflexes of
the mind that hint at the possibility of engaging the unknown on something resembling
its own terms. The Chthulucene awaits us.
“Ian Cheng: Forking at Perfection” is on view at the Migros Museum für
Gegenwartskunst in Zurich through May 16.
Ben Vickers is curator of digital projects at Serpentine Galleries in London and a
founder of the unMonastery.
NOTES
1. Elodie Evers in conversation with Ian Cheng, in Ian Cheng: Live Simulations, ed.
Elodie Evers, Irina Raskin, and Gregor Jansen, exh. cat. (Leipzig: Specter Books;
Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2015), 113.
2. Ian Cheng, Emissary Forks at Perfection statement, accessed February 4, 2016,
www.iancheng.com/emissary.
3. Evers in conversation with Cheng, Ian Cheng, 112.
ON THE COPY
SIMULATION
Forking at Perfection
by IAN CHENG
Baby Island Simulator is a little game for encounters with a baby. To play this game you
need a human baby who cannot yet walk, placed on a large isolated surface like a bed
or a kitchen island. You also need the presence of sympathetic adults. Now you do
nothing. The game is painful at first because Baby instinctively expects an adult gaze
and your adultness must fight the instinct to give attention back to Baby. After a few
seconds, Baby looks worried, fidgets around, reaches for something, fails, looks at you
hopelessly, and inevitably begins to cry. You must remain indifferent. From Baby’s
perspective, everything breaks down. The game everyone agreed to play since birth is
suddenly without the right players or behaviors. But don’t worry, Baby isn’t a
mechanism that risks repeating a single behavior to death. Baby is a complex
organism. The crying eventually stops. Faced with an open​ended game called living,
Baby begins to play with what its got. Sometimes Baby even invents new ways of
getting attention, or turns objects into adults. Where did that come from? You can
barely hide your delight. But you must keep silent, emit no love, and let the game
continue to evolve. You observe how the mismatch between habituated ability and
novel situation produces ridiculous, pathetic, undignified, creative behaviors, all of
which are irreducible to any one aspect of the game. You can’t explain it, but what has
happened here has emerged truthfully.
Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go
away.” Likewise, a truth is that which causally occurs even if you have no metric, name,
or context to value it. It is a causality emerging from an ongoing cascade of messy
causalities, with no inherent moral, goal, or affiliation. It is that which “writes itself.”
Scientists, comedians, explorers all say they are in the game of uncovering truths. But
this is no heroic activity. Truth​spotting is often confusing, discomforting, impossible
work, for most truths are not even perceivable or recognizable, which is to say, they
occur at scales that are uncalibrated to human space​time electromagnetic dopamine
status maximization. Moreover, our perception expects 1 + 1 = 2, but reality sometimes
gives us 1 + 1 = 3. Wetness from hydrogens and oxygens. Mob mentality from civilized
humans. Consciousness from electric meat. When we say, “that’s so true!!!” we are for
once glimpsing a causality in the wild in spite of our massive perceptual poverty. Yet
truths are not rare—they are causing causes now and forever, at all scales of reality,
making 2s and 3s, with or without our awareness or appreciation.
The opposite of a truth isn’t a falsity, it’s an ideal. An ideal is a frozen state of
perfection—how the mess of reality should be for us. It prescribes a precise past and
future that the present should aspire to reach and hold onto. Human existence is
nothing if not defined, organized, and stabilized by ideals—names, titles, forms,
heavens, hells, rituals, statuses, morals, myths, eras, scripts, models, supermodels,
objects, laws, lingo. Crucially, an ideal can only exist through the consent and shared
history of a community of humans. Ideals are the crude barometers from which we give
status to every piece of reality’s mess: authentic, real, fake, imitation, miracle,
imperfect, precious, natural. When a community stops believing in an ideal, the ideal
becomes worthless noise, but reality is still there.
What is the relationship between an ideal and a truth? An ideal derives from observing
a truth in the wild, coveting it, freezing it in the mind, sharing it, giving it a name, and
thus a legible human value. We call this truth​-to​ideal conversion event an idea. But
conversely, an ideal that is actualized or replicated by humans into material reality
immediately opens itself to encounters with influences too big, too small, too fast, too
slow, too numerous, or too contradictory for humans to preserve against. From this
uncontrollable porosity, truths transpire. We call this ideal​to​truth event a mutation.
You could say the ideal / truth split roughly equates to a humanist / materialist split, or
a drama / comedy split, or a left brain / right brain split, or Deleuze’s beings /
becomings, or what James Carse calls finite and infinite games. The temptation here is
to idealize truths and ideals, choose a team, and avoid the pain of further confusion.
Do you talk ideals or speak truths? Would you prefer to have an idea or a mutation? Are
you a winner or an explorer?
But what if we could view truths and ideals not as a (idealized) binary, but as phases in
a changing dynamic? And what if this view was not just the domain of philosophers,
physicists, and Buddhists, but one for us to play with?
There is a technology for exploring this dynamic between truths and ideals at lower
costs, less energy, less pain, less anthropocentrism, less speculation, and more
variety: it’s called simulation.
What is a simulation? It is game for staging “ideal + ideal = truth” processes, a
mutation machine for growing 3s out of ideals, enacted at a scale that humans can
perceive. Like a comedy setup or a laboratory experiment, the premise of a simulation
may be artificially constrained, focused on just a few elements, or staged to confront
materials that would never encounter each other in the messy wild. This premise is
simulation’s one big originating ideal, the perfect game. But once a simulation begins,
everything that transpires from its premise occurs truthfully, untampered by human
bias or knowledge. The materials, forces, and inherent energy artificially assembled
here act and react on their own terms, writing themselves, generating 1 + 1 = 3 truths.
The behaviors that emerge are only less “authentic” than PKDickian reality for those
humans who continue to idealize a simulation’s premise, and who continue to meter
each development with their own ideals. But just like messy unmitigated PKDickian
reality, the more ideals you impose on a simulation, the more it mutates them into
vulgar truths without stable status or worth. “Sims Gone Wrong” is Sims behaving
perfectly truthfully.
In the short game, a simulation can be instrumentalized to identify new ideals and
generate new ideas for a community. Boeing simulates new wing designs in a weather
hangar. Amazon simulates website variations to uncover maximum click​thru behaviors.
Soldiers simulate terroristic encounters in the Southwest. This kind of simulation ends
when the game gets perfect and some truth of optimal human value emerges.
In the long game, a simulation can be left open​ended, producing an infinite cascade of
catastrophic mutations from its premise. Darwin said the greatest simulation is nature
herself, who incessantly tries and fails aloud, never stopping at perfection. When a
local optimal state is reached, nature doesn’t idealize it, she forks it. In evolutionary
history, you could say that nature forked chimpanzee, from which Homo sapiens
emerged.
For humans eager to touch outside their own humanness, or for humans who long for a
closer relationship to reality’s messy dynamics, an open​ended simulation may provide
a new kind of exercise. The game is called Forking at Perfection: as the simulation
produces change after change after change before you, and emergent behaviors and
perceivable truths parade into your neocortex, you resist the awe of discovery, the
stress of chaos, the delight of mutation, and the temptation to satisfactorily walk away
then and there with new knowledge or ideas. Those are just human​scaled trophies.
Instead, fork that feeling like nature forks perfection and keep the simulation in play.
For learning to love this forkish feeling is learning to love the vulgarity of being alive is
learning to love simulation and simulation might be all we ever really got.
FAKE
Fake... Exhibition...
by Liam Gillick
Twenty years ago an endless skeptic about the direction art takes in times of
increasing economic polarization called to let me know that he believed someone was
attempting to fake his entire collection of conceptual art. The idea seemed ludicrous.
Yet notes, statements, simple instructions on scraps of paper—often with short
dedications—were being offered for sale for a couple of thousand pounds and
sometimes as little as a few hundred pounds. Faking conceptual art is particularly
useless. Nearly every work was intended to be carried in your head, to express a
universal quality, as something to be shared. Conceptual art’s use of systems and
Present
Tense
Interviews Thor Shannon Photography Alex John Beck
In this age of increasing dematerialization, where the tokens of our physical world
are rapidly disappearing into the invisible cloud above, what does it mean for humanity
to be left behind to occupy this newly stark, technological landscape? What does it
mean to exist still within bodies—these heavy, vulnerable, material structures—when the
majority of human experience now takes place outside them in the world beyond our screens?
What does it mean to be fully present anymore in an environment so inherently fractured
and mediated? Indeed, is total presence now even possible, necessary, or desirable at all?
The artists featured in this section—Ian Cheng, Ryan McNamara, Xavier Cha, Alex Da Corte,
and Trisha Baga—have recognized these questions as central to reaching an
understanding of our evolving contemporary landscape, and have developed updated
scenarios, perceptual models, and expressive formats to accordingly respond to and confront
their complex implications. These artists may well differ in their respective concerns
and chosen mediums, but they share a vital commitment to destabilizing outdated
interpretations and experiences of the world we think we know. Instead, they show
us the world as it truly is—in all its anxious, chaotic, dirty, enigmatic wonder—and by
extension, what it means for all of us to now have to live within it.
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1
Ian
Cheng
2
Ryan
McNamara
3
Xavier
Cha
4
Alex
Da Corte
5
Trisha
Baga
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1
Ian Cheng
are better at than machines. Robots and algorithms are the future of
many kinds of work, but it’s hard to say when or if they will ever exceed
humans engaged with perception invention and mental modeling.
“Who will keep their job?” is a fun game to play when looking at art.
O O O : Let’s start from the beginning. Before becoming an artist, you
studied cognitive science at UC Berkeley, and then worked at George Lucas’s
visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic. An atypical trajectory!
Following those experiences, what compelled you to switch to being an artist?
How would you say those experiences have affected—technically, aesthetically,
conceptually—the artwork you create today?
When viewing your work, I often find myself thinking about the Singularity—the idea that in an increasingly imminent future, humans and
machines will merge on a biological level—our cyborg futures realized.
The digitally rendered humanoid figures populating your motion-capture
videos often remind me of this, for example. They’re lifelike while also being
completely devoid of life; they’re so human and inhuman simultaneously. I’m
curious what your usage of these figures signifies in a broader sense. What
ideas do they—operating as device and/or motif—enable you to advance,
probe, and access in your practice?
IC : I only realized recently how much going to school and working
in the Bay Area has influenced me. Its recent history, startup culture,
and life-hacking mindset point to something that art intuitively shares,
which is the urgency to invent perceptions. Apple didn’t invent computers—it invented a culture of relating to and normalizing computers.
Duchamp didn’t invent the toilet—he invented Fountain, a reframing
of the activity of art as a platform for psychosocial perception invention.
I’ve been thinking about how a perceptual shift coupled with concrete
technological innovation has a very real capacity to ignite novel patterns
of behavior and cognition. We continue to ask how art makes us feel. But
we should ask more of art: what pattern of feelings does it invent inside
us? On dark evenings, art becomes an app to get outside of ourselves and
interface with non-human strangeness and complexity. Being an artist is
a kind of hack to engage the world and explore frontiers on these terms.
The humanoid figures are in service of starting from a legible place
and evolving to an alien place. In my videos and simulations, the
figures mutate in form and behavior. Seeing the journey from A to
alien is important because it allows the viewer to be exposed to the
continuity of change in real time. The figures are also an efficient way
of framing my impulse to compose with behavior as a material. It’s
thinking about the “software” that controls visible forms. Like the
way consciousness or the interpretation of nerve signals controls how
our body moves. A human, a robot, a phone—they’re only as good as
the abstract apps and patterns of energy that regulate them. In recent
simulations, I’ve “evolved” figures that combine scripted choreography with a basic nervous system that allows for the body to react
unscripted to changing environmental conditions. A figure starts with
the prescribed “willpower” to do a twerk routine, but with a few minor
disruptions ends up enacting an emergent dance that could not have
been prescribed or imagined. It finds a solution to keep dancing.
What are some of these novel patterns of behavior and cognition that you’re
speaking of ? What patterns of feelings would you say contemporary art and
culture are currently inventing inside us—most often, most strongly, most
excitingly, most problematically? How do or can you, as an artist, harness or
reinterpret those patterns and feelings in your work?
When I say art is an app, I mean that the art that excites me turns
what prevailing models consider noise into signal. One of the apps I’m
invested in is hijacking the anxiety and stress of disruptive change into
an experience of surfing through disruption, and becoming energized
by it. This isn’t an abstract idea; it’s a problem that requires form. For
me, simulations are one form to explore this. When we recall an artist’s
work, we feel their patterns inside us. Duchamp, Cage, Beuys, Smithson,
Warhol, Rainer, Gonzalez-Torres, Sehgal, Parreno, Huyghe, Donnelly,
Turrell, Herzog: these could almost be mental states, or names of highly
specific clusters of feelings, or lit pathways for journeying between
distant places in the mind, or models for organizing our experience of
reality. A lot of contemporary art fails to invent any patterns inside me.
Perception invention doesn’t seem to be a part of its horizon. In very
practical terms, though, perception invention is something humans
Your work seems to focus on and foreground the body in a way that many artists dealing with technology today often ignore. I’ve been thinking much more
about the body recently—what it is capable of, what it is vulnerable to, what
changes lie in store for it. What are your thoughts about the body, as it exists
both in art and our contemporary technological landscape?
I’m not interested in the body in itself. It’s just more matter. I’m interested in its mutation and the conditions that influence the direction of
mutation. I’m interested in what internal mental models and external
influences animate a body one way and not another.
182
Culture can fake it till
the mind makes it.
own body. Not to mention all the news I give attention to—cascades
of data about the climate, food, energy, health, genetics, the nature of
mind, that continuously unground conventional knowledge and hint
at the shape of vaster complexities. It’s an overwhelming feeling at
first because no one was born for this era. People talk about National
Unplug Day, doing an Internet cleanse, no screens an hour before bed.
But these are brief retreats that cannot and should not re-install past
paradigms of organizing our experience of the world. We’re all data
analysts now, especially in a blackout. The question that animates a lot
of my work is, how can I absorb and adapt to play with this exposure
to both tangible and non-human scaled uncertainties? In my recent
work with live simulations, the feelings I try to breed together are some
chimera of awe, loss of control, and this influences this influences this
influences this. As you watch the simulations unfold, you feel how
rapidly things are changing, how transient certain states of being are,
and the pleasure of seeing certain other states stabilize themselves. We
habitually desire control and predictability, but it seems urgent today
to cultivate mental models and cultural forms that allow us to exercise
or simulate a loss of control, and switch back and forth fluidly. It’s the
feeling of being able to rapidly change between mental apps. Allowing
habits to be born and die and be cannibalized project by project. It’s the
opposite of ADD; it’s surfing between zones of deep immersion and
growing energy—not losing energy—from that transience. It’s not playing to win, it’s playing to keep playing. Art is a place to develop, sculpt,
and weaponize these feelings.
What are some of the other principal ideas you’ve been mulling over recently?
How have those thoughts taken shape in your art, or affected its creation?
I’m reading a crazy book called On the Origin of Consciousness and the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes. He hypothesizes
that ancient humans as early as 3,000 years ago were not reflexively
conscious like you or me today. They had no metaphors for time to
concretely project forward about future plans or reflect back on their
own past and the causality of events. They lived in a perpetual present
state of mind. When they ran into a new problem, they heard vocal
hallucinations, which were interpreted as the voices of gods. Gods
were an ancient form of stress relief. Over time, the voices failed to
resolve catastrophes and the cognitive dissonance of meeting foreign
cultures with their own set of voices. New conceptual metaphors for
interpreting and dealing with local chaos and non-human abstractions
evolved. What we call consciousness today is the emergent result of
this evolution. What we call schizophrenia is a vestige of the bicameral
mind. The likely wrongness of the details in this thesis doesn’t matter
to me. Jaynes is truthful in spirit because he suggests the larger idea
that humans not only anthropomorphize objects, animals, and complex
systems—we anthropomorphize our own species! We assume ancient
humans had the same software in the head as we have now. But that
would be like dusting off the first cell phone and thinking it must be
running iOS 7 because that is our current horizon of experience. It
also points to another question: what immaterial processes of the past
can be gleaned from material record? When an alien archeologist
discovers a dead iPhone, how can the alien even fathom the existence
of the abstraction called Flappy Bird or Instagram from the composite iPhone materials alone? The same can be said for an archeology
of consciousness. Jaynes’ hypothesis also suggests that on the same
brain-meat hardware, many different kinds of ‘software’ can and will
emerge given enough external urgency and habituation. The mind is
an ecosystem that influences and is subject to influence. Consciousness is just the part of the ecosystem that gets the most grow light.
What can be growing/grown in the dark? These are frontier questions
that energize my current projects and attention. They demand from
me the production of hybrid forms and new perceptual models in
order to explore and play within their native zone.
I’m interested if you have any value judgments about this kind of adaptability, because while I completely agree with your assessment, I feel a bit
conflicted about it. What does it mean for culture, for society, for art, to be so
necessarily and extremely plastic? How are we expected to maintain positions
on anything—not to mention accept the positions of others—if it’s expected
(and in your model, demanded) that those convictions will change if/when a
future situation or context requires them to? Adaptability is vital in today’s
landscape, as you mention, but it also leads to a kind of totalizing relativism
that I find incredibly frustrating and problematic.
I hate relativism too. It denies that anything has truth value. What
I’m groping at is very different. It’s a mindset that takes change and
disruption as a given indifferent truth, and turns this condition into
a source of strength. A culture that can come to terms with this, and
develop forms to exercise it, cannot only weather change better, but can
be energized by uncertainty, confusion, and disruption. It’s like P90X
muscle confusion. Or Taleb’s Antifragility. A mindset that can morph
between models, garden its emotions, and cultivate a willingness to
discard the sunk cost of a perspective if it cannot pass a reality test. Is
this possible? I don’t know. But we can self-stimulate this process in the
form of art, apps, whatever cultural forms, to see. Culture can fake it till
the mind makes it. O
Clearly you’re honing in on some vital and urgent sentiment in contemporary
culture, given the number of exhibitions you’ve been in over the last year
(more than I can count on two hands). That said, I’m not quite sure how to
articulate what that feeling is. Is it an anxiety about the present, and/or the
future? Or maybe not an anxiety at all, but an excitement? Both?
The basic feeling I have every day is being awash in data—meaningless
visual patterns everywhere, endless email, the body language of strangers, signals from my girlfriend, feelings and ticks emanating from my
185
Future Fictions
Mariechen Danz, 'Cube Cell Stage, 2012, exhibition view at Gesellschaft für Aktuelle
Kunst, Bremen. Courtesy Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin
IAN CHENG
I’m nine years old watching Jurassic Park (1993) at the cinema for the third time. The
velociraptor is hunting the kids in the kitchen when the edge of the scene suddenly
bursts into white lava. I don’t remember this happening before. I lean forward in my
seat, excited to discover a new detail. The effect blooms everywhere. Humans and
dinosaurs erode into abstract bleeding blobs. Someone screams up at the dysmorphic
raptor, then back at the projectionist. I look back at the booth – the fucking film is on
fire. Projectionist and flames jumping around up there. House lights come on. Ushers
guide us to emergency exits. Outside in the parking lot, everyone stands searching,
squinting. No one knows what to do or how to behave. There were no plans to be
anywhere else right now.
Narrative is itself an intuitive technology for normalizing change, for cohering the
experience of reality into a sequence of measured consequential developments – a
kind of user experience (UX) design for organizing the look and feel of reality.
But sometimes random, unscripted, unforgiving, unmotivated, inexplicable shit hap​pens. Contingency is change happening faster than a human being can immediately
narrate, when the UX can’t keep up in real time.
The degree to which human beings can deploy narrative as a format for cohering the
cameos of reality’s contingencies is related to the frequency with which we have to
deal with those contingencies. An isolated cinema fire in 1993 can be UXed in its
retelling.
But now it’s 2013, and there’s the feeling that the straight story can no longer
normalize the complex, unpredictable forces of reality that intrude with greater and
greater frequency, let alone the incessant stream of big data reporting on these
complexities. What is the intuitive story of climate change? Shifts in the market?
Mutations in your brain? Your browsing history?
Specialists turn to non-intuitive technologies like quantitative analysis, simula​tion
modelling and probability in order to trace narratives that account for the present and
make predictive narrations of the near future. But for the rest of us, this kind of nonhuman storytelling is counterintuitive to our intuitive UX. We receive it, but we don’t
feel it, so we can’t embody it. Anxiety takes hold when embodied narration fails.
The evolution of the narrative form necessitates mutating our intuitive ux for story​telling with a coefficient of persistent anxiety. Anxiety is a condition that cannot be
eradicated, but can be managed. Is it possible to shift from a culture that wallows in
anxiety towards the creation of narrative tools that contain and manage a bug of
anxiety within them?
Imagine a narrative format that has
probabilistic outcomes.
Imagine a narrative format that can simulate
unscripted contingencies against scripted
choreography.
Imagine a narrative format that requires
its authors to embrace contingency and
irreversibly change during its making.
Imagine a narrative format that doesn’t
promise a scheduled time to end.
Imagine a narrative format that erodes as
you erode.
Some formats are already technically here. Recent treatments for post-traumatic
stress disorder deploy virtual reality simulation – brimming with contingency and
algorithmic anxiety – as a complement to classic therapeutic narration.
But that’s just the tip. To be ready for the future is not to imagine outlandish cure-all
technologies, but to do the work of developing formats to integrate intuitive and nonintuitive technologies towards unnatural normalization.
Ian Cheng is an artist, director and aspiring centenarian, based in New York, USA.
No.16
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ART INSIDE US
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Today, humans are engaged in a perceptual arms race. The proliferation of consulting, therapy, quantified self help, freakonomics clones, life hacking, neoshamanism – all point to our desire and urgency to
think differently, to shift perspective, to refactor perception. As computer scientist Alan Kay says, “Point
of view is worth 80 IQ points.” To interface with a changing world – a world where many of our existing
patterns of behavior hit the wall without trying too hard – some humans strive not to make more variety, or
accumulate more awareness, but to reinvent fundamental metaphors and models for relating to reality.
This is creativity at its most applied. And in our era, the framework for perception-invention has been codified no more clearly than in Silicon Valley.
Valley wisdom says every startup needs a hustler and a hacker. Jobs and Wozniak. Allen and Gates. Page
and Brin. The hustler invents the perception. The hacker invents the stimulus to trigger the perception.
These roles map onto the catalytic dyad of marketing & innovation. The money, scaling, repetition, and
decay come later.
What is marketing?
David Packard says, “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” True marketing
isn’t promotion or advertising or rhetoric. It’s the invention of a cognitive perception. In the crowded legacy ecosystem of mental models that prescribe how we read and organize the noise of reality, marketing
is the conceptual reconfiguration of reality’s familiar parts that opens rivers of energy and organization
previously unavailable. There’s a big chasm between a telemarketer and Steve Jobs, a marketing visionary
by even the most jaded accounts. This is a deeply creative activity when tasked to explore frontiers and
uncertainties of how we configure the plasticity of the mind to connect to the world.
What is innovation?
Innovation invents the stimulus to trigger the perception. It is the selective cannibalization and adaptation
of forms and processes that can manifest marketing’s invented perceptual niche into the material and bodily reality of the customer.
courtesy: the artist
What is the customer?
According to rogue thinker and writer Venkat Rao, a customer is “not a human being, but a novel and stable pattern of human behavior.” Google didn’t invent search, they invented Googling, a new pattern of information discovery behavior. Apple didn’t invent the computer, it invented a culture of relating to and
normalizing computers. Customers are not found, they are invented. When a product is truly successful,
when it can cross the uncanny valley of a skeptical and habit-holding public, when its perceptual reconfiguration becomes so embedded in our experience and feel of the thing, we don’t feel manipulated but
energized by the possibilities of action it opens. This doesn’t happen often – startup culture is awash in incentivized mediocrity – but it happens again and again. There is enough of a legible model in the Valley to
keep just enough creative humans striving for that horizon.
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In contrast to the Valley, the zone of human creativity with the least degree of clarity is art. Whether by absence of harder pressures or for entrenched legacy reasons, art’s complex history has been long dominated
by soft terms – taste, style, personal expression, freedom, beauty, feelings, affect, critical mirror, objecthood, via negativa, this or that medium, art if you call it art. This softness gropes at some of art’s true features, and is inseparable from our blissfully foggy cognitive model of what art is. But like any zone in
culture, art is a human activity, one in which energy is exchanged, pooled, reorganized, disrupted. And in
any energy exchange, the control of psychosocial perception is key. Peeling back the ineffable softness:
Could it be that artists are fundamentally involved with the creation and manipulation of perception?
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Let’s stretch the marketing & innovation model onto art and see what happens.
What is art?
A cultural zone engaged in the exchange of energy, whose sacred activity and exercise is perception-making, sensorial and/or cognitive. Play and creative destruction are rewarded and protected because they
are precisely the processes yearned for – some useful vestige of the artist as creative locus bursting with
ways of seeing.
What is an artwork?
The interfacing-thing that fuses the invented perception and its mechanism of stimulation. In other
words, an embodied exercise in marketing and innovation.
What is an artist?
The schizophrenic conflation of hustler & hacker. It’s hard to be two kinds of people at once, and one
inevitably leads the other. Crazy happens easy.
What are the traps?
Going too hard one way or the other for too long. All marketing hustle and no innovation hacking is naming the air between air. All innovation and no marketing is a world of digital loom paintings and 3d
printed UV inked arduino powered portraiture. Energy that doesn’t circulate between these processes
pools and burns fast. An artist with no internal values – driving beliefs willing to be reality tested – is
mechanically exercising marketing and innovation like so many Silicon Valley startups trying to find
themselves a minimum viable fit within the tide pool of energy.
What is not even being trapped?
Failure to acknowledge art as an interhuman energy exchange. Neither hustler nor hacker, the artist is left
cargo culting a long past perceptual invention. Mix-breeding horses, but not even building a faster horse.
Testing well-proven values that are themselves eroding in value. Perhaps this is the line that is crossed
when art slides into craft and its public becomes everybody and nobody.
What is the artist’s public?
Not human beings, but a pattern of human behavior that has been invented, constructed by the artwork.
When we recognize an artist’s work, we are recognizing this unique behavioral pattern stimulated inside
us. Duchamp. Smithson. Klein. Rainer. Beuys. Turrell. Lynch. Herzog. Cage. These could almost be
mental states, or names of highly specific clusters of feelings, or lit pathways for journeying between distant places in the mind. We continue to intuitively ask how art makes us feel. We should ask more of art:
what pattern of feelings does art invent in us?
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Parreno’s animated exhibition design, Pierre Huyghe’s indifferent biotope – all zones where a precisely
exposed perceptual model meet and push specialist engineering. Tino Sehgal: not performance, but that
Tino Sehgal thing he constructs. Sturtevant: marketing ahead of the marketing curve, a psychosocial
gamer. Trisha Donnelly: minimal illusion for maximal patterns of alien feeling.
Can we read art history through this lens?
The basic promise of art has always been perception-making. Earlier forms of art took on the challenge
of illusionistic/optical perception-making. Renaissance artists saw no separation between perceptual manipulation and scientific innovation. The fissure opened up by Duchamp onward to Conceptual Art enriched perception-making to encompass cognitive perception-making – mental models. Today, nearly
every artist is to some degree ‘conceptual’, in other words, engaged in marketing. Iconoclastic positions
are themselves marketing positions in times when such perspectives feel underappreciated. The influence
of philosophy on art reflects a desire to cannibalize deeper perspectives. Some artists literally market underappreciated philosophy. The enduring influence of Rosalind Krauss’ phrase “expanded field” reflects
the compulsion of artists to sculpt perception within broader fields of innovation. Artists cannibalize innovations from the worlds of material science, management science, entertainment, advertising, event
design, third world ghetto hacking, Silicon Valley, synthetic biology, nature.
How is an artist different from a startup?
Steve Blank’s definition: “A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable and repeatable business model.” The name of the game is to invent a perception that can birth and stabilize a new pattern
of human behavior, but an artist’s work is never quite stabilized. Artists engage in cycles of creative destruction with greater frequency and social permission than any organization. Artists habitually sabotage
their own game, throw it all away, and get amateur to get outside themselves. This creates an intimate
awareness of the impermanence of all things and perspectives, metaphysycs left standing, making art de
facto a more spiritual and more materialist activity. Startups can’t afford to be this ‘useless’ for very long.
Scalable and repeatable are qualities an artist’s studio eventually performs, but few artists engaged in
perception-creation are truly energized by having to repeat themselves. Except Warhol, he scaled and repeated as innovation. On rare evenings, art invents perceptions and stimuli that ignite patterns of behavior no human is ready to acknowledge or feel. It alienates us from ourselves in ways no startup has an
incentive to do or horizon to reach. This is art’s fundamental gamble in the great energy exchange of
human culture.
Who are clear examples of artists exercising marketing & innovation?
Duchamp didn’t invent the toliet, he invented Fountain – the distillation (and stimulus) of art as perception-invention activity. Duchamp even did consulting, advising Calder to call his sculptures ‘mobiles’.
The readymade is still inventing patterns of behavior in so many young artists today, an endless gate of
energy. Others: Warhol, Yves Klein, Smithson. More recently: Paul Chan’s Badlands Unlimited, Philippe
What now?
Among the many wild gems packed into On the Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1978), Julian Jaynes talks about how Odysseus was among the first in his era to mentally
grasp time via the metaphor of space. Life wasn’t a perpetual present like for many of his bicameral contemporaries. It was “a present wedged between past and future” with each passing and anticipated moment a place to reflect on within a spatial sequence. Try thinking about time without recourse to the place
called ‘past’ and the place called ‘future’; it’s painful to reinstall old mental software. Perhaps ‘art’ itself
is just an expedient name for a more porous energy transaction happening along dimensions that our legacy model of art is only barely capable of grasping. After all, human creativity precedes the zone of art.
True creativity in our era is hacking life to bounce forward within the chaos of the anthropocene. This is
a world of risk, chance complexity, nonlinear change, disproportionate highs and lows, information wealth, dislocation, peak attention, and ecstatic play. As Odysseus spatialized time in his tumultuous era, we
will metaphorize the chaos and noise of now to get outside ourselves, and develop interfaces to surf alien
dimensions of material, psychosocial, and informational reality. New emotions will be invented for the
occasion.
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Why does art need a public?
Because art is an energy exchange, not a lonely thing in the studio, and like how an app needs smartphones to inhabit, the fundamental activity of perception-creation needs minds (and eyes) to metastasize within. The life of an artwork is deeply social even if the artist sometimes isn’t.