Ugly Blog

Synthetic Times: Media Art Now, in C-Arts Magazine (July 2008)

- Dr. Ray Kurzweil

The future started fifty years ago, when mathematician John von Neumann noticed that the geometrically accelerating pace of technological progress “gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue.”

The most famous futurist living today, Dr. Ray Kurzweil, transformed von Neumann’s insight into a mathematical predictor that has, so far, correctly foreseen by over a decade specific things like the internet explosion, handheld reading devices for the blind (predicted down to the exact year), and the year a computer would be crowned chess champion (he was off by one year).

Now he is predicting that by the early 2030s, we’ll have “eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain.” The eliminated parts will be replaced by nanobots. In the meantime, medical technology will start to correct some of the biological causes of aging, further increasing our lifespan, hopefully long enough to reach the “third bridge,” where computers become powerful enough to download our personalities. At this point, the singularity, we become pure information. Keep a backup copy in case of crashes, and you can live forever.

Human beings don’t easily grasp the full mathematical power of exponential growth, but even those who’ve never heard of the coming technological singularity feel its approach, and new media artists have been giving us Heironymous Bosch-meets-Neuromancer glimpses of what it will look like.

Synthetic Times: Media Art China 2008 is a Beijing Olympics cultural project opening at the National Art Museum of China in June 2008. At a preview symposium held in New York City on April 15^th at MoMa, Parsons, the New School for Design, and Eyebeam, in conjunction with the National Art Museum of China, media art pundits debated issues revolving around exhibition themes like Beyond Body; Emotive Digital; The Recombinant Reality; and Here, There and Everywhere-themes that might as well have been called The Coming of the Singularity.

The symposium was opened by Synthetic Times curator Zhang Ga, who coincidentally is also the Visual Art Advisor for the 2008 World Science Festival (May 28 to June 1) at which Kurzweil unveiled his latest predictions.

First to preview his work was Miao Xiaochun, a Chinese artist who presented a 3D computer-generated version of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement, that included perspectives of the damned looking up, the chosen looking down, sideways, behind, and that ultimately followed them through toward their individual fates. The most fun, really, was watching a freefall of the bodies (grayscale depictions of the artist himself) all the way down, far, far down, an unending direction of down, spiraling smaller until gone. For Beijing he will show a similarly processed work based on Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights-Hieronymous’ rogue beasts reincarnated as piles of cars or animated forks, all frolicking the horrors of our contemporary condition. In excerpts/stills of the incomplete work, one could already see a more complete aesthetic and ideological progression of the previous work’s idea, continuing toward a supercharged, Hollywoodized read of old but famous art.

Next was the Smell Madame, Sissel Tolaas, a perky, fashionable-looking blonde, a walking artpiece who synthesized her own natural smell and wears her amplified “self” around town. She has dedicated the last 20 or so years of her life to the Smell Archive, a collection of 6,730 smells varying from dirt to money to armpits. For the past six years she has worked with six men documenting the smell of their fears, extracting bursts from their armpits at the sweatiest moments. The result was a kind of “scratch and sniff this phobia” gallery show where viewers become participants who touch the wall and smell a particular man in angst. The men’s identities are anonymous save the distinctive smell they exude on their given wall. She comments that we fear the smell of the smell of fear.

Etoy, a confusingly inspiring and hubristic long-term art-project team of some 25 people was represented by agent etoy.ZAI (a name to drive copyeditors to distraction), who on this day wore a uniform-looking outfit with bright orange shoes and had a certain theatrical presence, affecting a style somewhere between Dr. Strangelove and “clean crazed clinician” that, in fact, seemed a crux of the aesthetic. Their 17-year project: Mission Eternity Sarcophagus, a shippable cargo container internally flanked with 17,000 LED lights filled with “the life we leave after death,” a digital data archive of the memories we leave behind as electrical surges and impulses in the brains of those who knew us, recordings of our laughter, images, opinions of others about us, documents, and even ashes. They have begun archiving the “remains” of certain worthy test pilots such as Timothy Leary and the still-living Swedish microfilm pioneer, Sepp Keiser. The creepy, almost subliminal THX 1138-style voiceover and puns like the recurring phrase “crossing the dead-lines” made the piece feel alternately like an ironic put-on and a blossoming insight into the frontiers of art and science. The website’s disclaimer reads, “Mission Eternity is everything, nothing, forever…” And when it’s finished, the singularity will be just around the corner.

Kurt Hentschlager then talked about constantly being turned on. The ever-increasing power of all the gadgetry we use on a daily basis is a process of emancipation from the inefficiencies of death: the moment we lose the possibility of an afterlife, fate becomes a nonquestion. We suppose the work he shows should be read as cerebrally as his idea, but it was impossible. It was a video of computer generated, generic blue bodies floating in blue space or liquid, twitching to music.

Chico MacMurtie is a veritable machine-making hippie. He said simply that he creates machines to show the human condition: a park bench where a skeleton sits as you sit and stands when you stand, a blow-up totem that “grows” its own mythology and deflates dramatically to the ground, and a life-size chirping tree whose branches reach toward the viewer, then weep water. (As children were believing this tree was real, the artist believed he was “getting somewhere.”) His latest piece resembles a real live Transformer-a totem mobile, hybrid ecstasy- a Citroen car that disassembles itself toward the sky, then deconstructs vertically, appearing as a majestic alien life form briefly before reconstructing earthward again.

Meanwhile, Mariana Rondon creates a synthesis of laboratory and magic show in her “industrial uteruses.” Projecting images of adults in the fetal position onto giant bubbles in a darkened room, she first perfects the harmony of things like temperature, humidity and PH for conditions of giant bubble viability. What started as an inquiry into bio-genetics and ethics evolved into these “restorative images,” as she calls them. There is something funny about the idea, but the images are actually mesmerizing.

Another slightly odd fit was Marek Walcak’s use of the Flickr image archive to manifest the “urban utopia.” He uses software to converge multiple images tagged with terms like “pastoral” or “rapturous” or “generally eastern” to get at what he calls “no place.” The resulting fleeting images can be quite beautiful but showing this work in China, where Flickr is banned, adds an ironic twist.

Like some of the weirder theories of quantum mechanics where a chiral universe nevertheless allows infinitely big to be mathematically identical to infinitely small, Bengt Sjolen, Adam Somlai Fischer and Usman Haque go in the opposite direction of Walcak by making a wifi camera obscura that, using a robotic swiveling head and an empty wasabi horseradish dish, takes single-pixel images. It looks quite amateurish, and in fact that may be what they’re after, to create a simple template that everyone could put together in a do-it-yourself kit. The tinker-toy-looking head swivels the tin can into place and records a visual map of wifi signals streaming through the ether. Sjolen said one night they were recording in an affluent Mexican neighborhood and after printing a set of wifi signals that covered the page they pointed to record in another direction and got no images at all. The next day they realized they were pointing toward the poor neighborhood across the street, which apparently had very little wifi action. What results is a sort of technology census, an invisible street poll of the haves and have nots and the access to information that money buys.

Whether the watchers are watching with a wasabi dish or an NSA satellite, Rafael Lozano Hemmer likes to look back at the watchers. In his work you can, for instance, walk into a public courtyard and the shadow created by your body wakes up a “person” who begins a projected visual dialogue with you, waving, smiling, dancing, etc. As long as you stand still and pay attention to it, the projection will interact with you. It feels a bit invasive to have a person projected onto your shadow, however playful it may be, but the minute you walk on the projection dissipates. Hemmer related his work to the map generator iSee, which works like most internet map finder programs; except this one assumes pedestrians may have additional agendas, other than saving time, and generates the “safest path of least surveillance” between any two points on the map. Finally, human-friendly technology that shows people how to walk through their big-brotherish cities “without fear of being caught on tape by unregulated security monitors.” It’s a more creative approach to public safety, in which images are given rather than taken and “real time safety” replaces the current ex post facto “who done it.”

From Hemmer’s living shadows to Kroker’s “pervasive, all-encompassing membrane of connected machines that operate on a planetary scale” (the internet), it seems what all the artists were after some kind of out-of-body experience-and their work, rather than creating the possibility for the viewer, was by and large a recording of their own desire for that out of body experience. Fair enough. Perhaps they simply sense the coming of Kurzweil’s singularity, on the other side of which we will be downloadable and immortal and life will suddenly become very different.

But, as the Francis Crick quote goes, “God is a hacker, not an engineer”-we evolved by fits and spurts and false starts and dead ends, not by grand design. The same has been true for art, for the history of art, and so the synthetic work, like our synthetic time, has a slightly “off” engineered feel, cutting against the grain not only of our evolution, but also of something in the nature of art itself.

There also seems to be a pessimistic edge to all new media art, as if we haven’t gotten control of even the idea of the power of the machines we are incorporating ourselves into, as if the collective intelligence factor is creating something that possibly our cave ancestors felt when faced with tools that killed too efficiently. Just how necessary is it to make every impulse, every wish, instantly executable. And what do we do with all the bodies?

– by Alexander Boldizar and Michelle Swayne

Synthetic Times: Media Art Now was originally published in C-Arts Magazine (July 2008)