Uncanny Valley
Christopher Kulendran Thomas in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann “Ground Zero” at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, 2019 Photo: Andrea Rossetti
Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI, curated by Claudia Schmuckli at the De Young Museum, features artists investigating the material histories and corresponding aesthetics of emerging technologies. This thematic survey is long overdue in the Bay Area and includes work from Forensic Architecture, Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Annika Kuhlmann, Martine Syms, Ian Cheng, Lawrence Lek, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Simon Denny, Stephanie Dinkins, Zach Blas, Agnieszka Kurant and the Zairja Collective. The term uncanny valley refers to a creepy feeling associated with an earlier stage of robotics. The feeling locates itself between feeling far from human and thus comfortably removed, and passably human and so unremarkable. Schmuckli is presumably expanding the term to hold a general sense of anxiety and discomfort with the algorithmic impositions on our lives from Silicon Valley. If I had to choose a word to describe the feeling of being stalked by someone collecting information and trying to manipulate me, uncanny probably wouldn’t be the first word to come to mind. Either way the themes taken up by the artists in the show engage with pressing issues of the day, organized under the rubric of Artificial Intelligence—a term that resists easy definition, and rests on unsure foundations. It's widely known that so-called AI reflects all the biases of its creators as well as their financial imperatives to capture data and attention. The Uncanny Valley exhibition mounts what could generally be thought of as an educational and critical survey addressing both a museum audience and neighboring Silicon Valley.
Almost twenty years ago Steve Dietz, a (then) new media curator, mapped Linda Nochlin's ‘Why are there no great women artists?’ thesis onto the plight of the new media artist. The essay argues that there are structural biases that prevent the valuation of counter hegemonic practices and asks us to consider digitally born works by a not yet determined criterion that behaves in different ways. It foregrounds the institutionalized cultural forces that exclude women and, less significantly, net artists. There is a recourse to what previously constitutes a great artist and great art and an implicit bid for access to the privileges that they entail. My concern with this thinking has to do with the way it counteracts the reimagining and practice of more equitable and ecological relations, that from the outset are not predicated on class and identity-based disparities. It follows that the answer to the problem of Facebook, is decidedly not in appointing Sheryl Sandberg the chief operating officer. Still the question of how the museum responds to the internet age persists. Evidently, in the throes of epochal shifts there is a tendency towards illustrative works that engage contemporary theory. Within the Anthropocene we’ve experienced a staggering amount of bad ecological art. While the subject of mass extinction and climate change is certainly urgent in its need for address, the machinery of art production has glutted the cultural arteries with facile, didactic and propagandistic works that signal a rote and superficial ecological virtuousness. With works addressing emergent technologies the institution has a limited vernacular that we’re seeing deployed with varying degrees of effect and affect.
I saw an online video version of Hito Steyerl’s Broken Glass lecture a half year in advance of the Uncanny Valley exhibition and there wasn’t much the installation communicated that the video didn’t. Moreover, the deep and provocative thinking seemed undone by its setting in the gallery with its exaggerated scale and a distracting environment. Substantively, Steyerl’s media augmented lectures have offered me the most insight and lasting resonances—as well as her writing, while her installations can feel like capitulations to museological imperatives for spectacle and purchase in attention economies. Be that as it may, I’m content with any vehicle that brings forward the shattering question: how many AI’s can dance on the head of a pin?
Simon Denny’s Amazon worker cage patent drawing as virtual King Island Brown Thornbill cage (US 9,280,157 B2: “System for transporting personnel within an active workspace,” 2016) installation view in Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI on view at the de Young Museum February 22 – October 25, 2020
Simon Denny’s Amazon worker cage patent drawing as virtual King Island Brown Thornbill cage (US 9,280,157 B2: “System for transporting personnel within an active workspace,” 2016) inserts a virtually augmented nearly extinct bird into a model of a human worker cage designed and patented by Amazon. The accompanying didactics reference Kate Crawford and Vladen Joler’s seminal Anatomy of an AI essay. The cited essay itself is a mixed media, installation-ready form of expanded scholarship that when put in conversation illuminates the radical restructuring of disciplinarity and language hierarchies inside, outside, and through the white cube. These interrelated subjects are imperative and the museum is a fitting site for staging this kind of research-based, aestheticized challenge to power—even if the work, as art, doesn’t transcend its thoughtful juxtapositions. It also raises the question: when this work goes to a gallery or art fair, is there an appropriate term to describe profiteering on a poetic critique of capitalism? I could then retroactively ascribe it to Edward Burtynsky’s photography, Olafur Eliasson’s LED lamp factory at the Venice Biennale, Tom Sachs space program, and Ragnar Kjartansson’s recent performance at the Women’s Building in San Francisco.
Lynn Hershman Leeson Shadow Stalker installation view in Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI on view at the de Young Museum February 22 – October 25, 2020
Continuing through Uncanny Valley, I found myself wondering if an exhibition like Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Shadow Stalker wouldn’t be better suited for a classroom. After inputting your email and standing in front of a camera, your likeness and personal data are projected on the walls while actress Tessa Thompson explains predictive policing. While topical and relevant, it features none of the things I look for in art. Those things that resist easy description, stimulate the ineffable and expand the way I sense the world. If I had to explain to my 11 year old daughter the effects of predictive policing and data surveillance, Leeson’s installation could be a good approach. Although when I tried this, she began making a TikTok video of her projected data shadow doing the renegade dance to K-Camps Lottery before getting into an extended emoji laden text conversation with Martine Syms AI chatbot in an adjacent gallery.
Zach Blas, The Doors installation view in Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI on view at the de Young Museum February 22 – October 25, 2020
Zach Blas, in a constellation of references to California counterculture and self optimizing tech libertarianism, suggests an easy compatibility between the two. They both perhaps develop out of the western enlightenment project and feel misguided and dangerous pretty much throughout. His collaboration with—or training of, generative neural networks to produce a soundtrack and visuals yields a profoundly ungratifying and inhospitable ambiance consistent with the radioactive green-cast shrine of nootropics rising from the center of a metatron flecked with plastic plants.
Screenshot of my phone taking a picture of Trevor Paglen’s They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead ... (SD18) in Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI on view at the de Young Museum February 22 – October 25, 2020
Trevor Paglen compiled thousands of mug shots fed to an early facial recognition AI, conceivably to situate our current relationship to machine learning on a longer continuum of bias, profiling, exploitation, and surveillance. This illustrative aestheticization of what might have been called journalism last century has found for Paglen cultural and financial compensation in art spheres what would have produced negligible results in more conservative disciplines. As a life with dignity in the vocations of journalism or academia seems further unattainable under neoliberalism, canny individuals disposed to their tenets may find themselves competing for a position in the global art class, where they can better determine their lives and flow across borders like capital. The critique in They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead ... (SD18) is undone by the uninspiring reproduction of its offending themes. A pattern for Paglen most extremely articulated by his post MacArthur satellite launch to occupy (or colonize) space for ‘purely artistic’ means. The satellite failed to deploy, lost its orbit, and joined the rest of the space junk, adding up to whatever we’d call the outer space equivalent of jumping the shark. I preferred when he was taking people scuba diving to see fiber optic cables at art fairs or using art institutions to host relays on the anonymous internet network Tor. It’s difficult to fit a project like Autonomy Cube into categories like ‘artist’ and ‘MacArthur genius,’ when it relies on thousands of anonymous, unremunerated volunteers working in concert for a common cause.
Trevor Paglen Autonomy Cube
A lot of the art concerning the internet that I encounter in institutional art settings tends to feel overstated in its aboutness. I get the feeling I’m being condescended by an authorial expert, somehow outside of these economies, criticizing and educating from on high. Many works rely heavily on retrograde or esoteric graphics, often with an apathetic, ironic disposition of a collective like DIS or the extreme sensational velocities of artists like Trecartin or Satterwhite. These works seem to desperately signal that, I, art consumer, am far removed from a whole generation or culture that has to be performed in caricature to articulate its epochal rupture. Meanwhile, most everyone I know is implicated in the internet, making images, writing, publishing and curating—not just about themselves but also the media that, in part, defines them. Within the limitless circulation of images and text that characterize the contemporary, I regularly find wonder, beauty, insight, pleasure and the other qualities I look to art for. What is most missing for me, is connecting with a diverse, intergenerational community in a shared convivial space.
It stands to reason that scarcity, speculation, elitism and the maintenance of the great artist author paradigm are what keep a trillion dollar art industry going. Concurrently, the capaciousness of art as a category and the democratization of the tools for production and circulation have created a pretty hard to reconcile set of conditions with the art market. Perhaps a lot of Internet Art is really institutions and art markets trying to reproduce themselves with grand gestures while what is really interesting and vital has long vacated them. Cheap displays of scale and institutional resources distort and rarify what is available and public, if not algorithmically obscured and manipulated. I’ve written elsewhere, that after art exceeds the limits of its capacity, it persists in a latent, quantum-like position, waiting to be activated by configurations of subjects, objects, relations and time. Maybe ‘post internet’ art is a term wishing away the advent of a new world, mainly used by an old establishment threatened by the implications of the technologies that undermine its sovereignty. Of course these emerging technologies themselves represent a new establishment that is even more threatening in its architectures and the ideologies constructing them.
Forensic Architecture Model Zoo https://vimeo.com/392828243
While Forensic Architecture, whose dataful elaboration of the Kanders Whitney resignation was included in Uncanny Valley, was opening its first US based museum retrospective in Miami, founding member Eyal Wiezman was refused a visa to the United States after being flagged by an algorithm. If this exhibition feels primarily concerned with critique, resistance, and education about big data, networks, and AI, the culmination of the survey is Forensic Architecture. As an interdisciplinary collective, Forensic Architecture expands the fields of architecture and art within the rapidly accelerating mediascape from which evidentiary assemblages are compiled to assess the common and globally connected concerns of our built environments. This expanded form understands architecture as a media form inscribed with, and disseminating information produced by global politics and capital flows. It shares a broad horizon with thinkers like Keller Easterling and asks us to reconsider the discipline in its common usage. Comprised of architects, developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, artists, scientists, lawyers and educators, Forensic Architecture undertakes advanced spatial and media investigations into cases of human rights violations with and on behalf of communities affected by political and environmental violence. They demonstrate a paradigmatic, almost pinnacle example of art in service of political and social urgency while moving through art spaces, international courtrooms and UN assemblies.
As someone concerned with education and activism, I honor Forensic Architecture’s practice and this kind of exhibition making. At the same time, what feels absent in Uncanny Valley are the qualities in art that are not easy to articulate, have no clear politics, and come from a space less teleological and more, lets say, essayistic. The art establishment, in a mature stage of institutional critique, has favored works in the vernacular of the institution, addressing the internet at the structural level and performing market-ready critiques. Far less encountered, in the upper altitudes of culture, are works born on the internet engaging the technologies endemically and addressing basic questions like, what kind of world do we want to live in?—Which is different from what kind of world do we not want to live in? And what is actually worth making and sharing within this new horizon of possibilities? I suspect the current avail of critique and education may be a precursor for the kind of work I’m interested in. I’m gesturing towards art that feels less didactic, less political, less ironic, less nihilistic, less resolved, more humble, more open, more inquisitive, more generous, more sincere—without sacrificing complexity, criticality, beauty and poetry. It feels appropriate at this juncture to cultivate appreciative senses and ways of supporting work that engages the contemporary, without imposing on it positivist valuations, a requirement to unambiguously demonstrate social or political efficacy, and the need to meet the demands of the market.
Pierre Huyghe, Exomind, 2017, Concrete cast with wax hive, bee colony.
I hope this exhibition encourages a critical dialogue between art and technology at this decisive locus of influence. Pierre Huyghe's sculpture Exomind, which at the time of writing this has not yet arrived at the show, is composed of a hive of bees in place of a head on a human body. When it arrives it will be installed in the garden where it will participate in an ecosystem of plants and pollinators. This movement away from the museum and the individual may be instructive for understanding, resisting and creating in these troubling times.