The following is an edited transcript of an artist talk for Anthony Discenza’s exhibition Dæmonomania that took place at Et al, etc. on April 7, 2024. Participants: Anthony Discenza, Filip Kostic, Rhonda Holberton, and Ana Saygi.
Rhonda Holberton
Thanks everybody for coming. This is going to be a conversation about Anthony’s exhibition; the four of us have met once before to talk about our impressions of the show. I'm Rhonda Holberton, an artist; I work with art and technology, reconciling geologic time and the individual biological body. I teach at San Jose State.
Anthony Discenza
Hi, I’m Anthony Discenza, thanks for being here. I'm an interdisciplinary artist; I lived here in the Bay Area for a very long time, but now I live in Western Massachusetts, where I do my own work, and where I also run a very informal artist residency/project space called lower_cavity.
Ana Saygi
Hi, my name is Ana Saygi, and I am an AI user as well as an artist. I also run a space in SF called Slash. It’s in the Dogpatch, and I'm going to use this moment to self-promote and say that there's going to be a show opening next weekend at Slash by Jen Liu. So, you're all welcome to come there. Thank you.
Filip Kostic
Hi everyone, my name is Filip Kostic. I'm an artist and video game developer from Los Angeles, a friend of Anthony's. I make a lot of work dealing with atomization and labor, ranging from Twitch streams to sculptures to video art and video games. I'm happy to be here.
Rhonda
All right, I'm going to read off a series of prompts in the spirit of AI, something that we can all mash around in our own thinking processes—in this stack if you will. And then we'll use those prompts to talk about our impressions of the exhibition, and then we’ll move into discussion of more specific works.
Before I jump into that, I'll read the prompts, and then I'll ask Anthony to tell us a little bit about why he titled the show the way that he did, and that'll give us some time to think.
There’re six prompts. One, an obvious one if anybody knows about Anthony's practice, is the evolution of media from print to broadcast to network media, and from there to what I'll describe as neural. That's a definition that I'm borrowing from K. Allado-McDowell that he uses to describe AI systems, but I like it because we can apply it to other things—a neural descriptor of media.
The second is the structural properties of the physical and computational systems of neural media. So, the tension between a highly abstract computational space and the materials that are needed to run it.
The third topic is the bodily positionality relative to both cognitive phenomenology of media and the materiality of the systems that produce it.
We'll stop using such academic terms probably when we're talking, but this is how I think—I've been institutionalized.
Another point is the liminal membranes and aspirational spaces—those are two points, but I think it's interesting to try to combine them so we can think about these liminal membranes. This could be the rubber strips that we walked through to enter the space; we can also think about it while the audio work is playing—it's an AI rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” That's an aspirational space, but I’m also using the idea of the rainbow as a permeable passageway.
If you know Anthony's other work, there's a strong tendency to use language as a tool of conjuring—certainly, there's a lot of what we might be able to call "magic" in the exhibition.
The last point is reality—thinking about reality-making hallucinations and body truth. So, those are some of the points that we might use to locate the conversation.
Before we jump into impressions of the exhibition with the panelists, I'm going to ask Anthony to talk a little bit about the title of the show.
Anthony
Thanks. I don't know that there's a strong one-to-one correlation between the title and the exhibition, or between any of the specific works in the exhibition with any others. It's an attempt to put different things that I've been thinking about and working with over the past two years into a circuit with each other, where each thing is a little bit incomplete and tilts towards something else somewhere else in the exhibition.
The word "demonomania" is a psychological condition that refers to being convinced or believing that you are possessed by spirits or demonic entities, but I've changed the spelling. So, instead of D-E-M-O-N, it's the older iteration of the word demon, D-A-E-M-O-N, which is used in computer science and engineering, where “daemon” references a process that runs in the background. For example, everyone's gotten an email kicked back from the “mailer daemon.” My interest is in the way that science and computer science borrow terms derived from the supernatural or the spiritual, and in this complex relationship between technology and magic. I’m introducing some kind of friction or an expanded architecture into that word, but I’m also still thinking about it in its usual sense, as something demonic or infernal that is associated with ritual or ceremonial magic, where you summon up something to do your bidding, and there's a cost associated with that.
I’m thinking about that as a metaphor for our relationship to technology as users, the hard infrastructure of technology, the way that technology is...the energy that drives it is still being underwritten by fossil fuels, which derive from the tissue of living organisms that pulled carbon out of the atmosphere hundreds of millions of years ago. So, the exhibition title is meant to be a conceptual environment that allows people to have different associations come forward or not.
Rhonda
That's a great foundation for the discussion. If any of those points that Anthony made are handholds that are more useful than my six points, feel free to riff on that.
Filip
There's this sense of the objects in the room that we all encounter; there are obvious bodily relationships to all the works. There's the conceptual mapping of the show, the way that things are titled—I'm describing my phenomenological experience of walking in and dealing with the work.
And then there's a weird spiritual geist that everything is pointing towards. I haven't really solved those triangulations whatsoever–I don't know that solving it is the point of it—but I feel it’s more of a pointing out of this third thing that’s in the room with us constantly, something that everything points towards. Whether it's the lights being turned on randomly and me noticing that I'm a thing in a room being watched, or if it’s the realization that there is a spirit of a dead singer that's roaming around through this reconstructed version of her, or this party that never happened that’s depicted in these 7,200 photo prints…there’s a lot of vectors in the room pointing towards an ineffable quality that I'm constantly contending with.
Rhonda
Anthony, for those who haven't seen the show, will you just describe the audio that we would be hearing?
Anthony
Yeah, a central component of the show is an audio piece called Somewhere, Someone, which is a clone or synthetic version of Judy Garland's voice singing a non-verbal, sing-song version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” There are multiple tracks that are playing in and out of phase with each other on small Bluetooth speakers placed throughout the main room in the exhibition. The work has a spectral feel; the spectrality of electronic media and particularly of generative AI is something that I’m often thinking about. While there's almost no figuration in the show, there is a constant pointing to some sense of bodily presence in different ways.
Ana
I want to explain my experience walking into the exhibition in a chronological way. I came on the opening day, and I remember entering and seeing the airport chairs, then on my right I saw this drink dispenser. I thought "Oh, great, there's something to drink." But a friend was like, "No, that thing is actually going to kill you." And I thought, "Oh, I'm a millennial, I'm made of microplastics. We are strong immunes at this point."
Then I came into this room with the flickering lights and the audio. I thought, "there's some eerie feeling; I cannot point out why." And then seeing these sort of hoarder or frat party images that have no figures in them—I think there's only one figure in the whole exhibition, the ambrotype, and that was super creepy to me. I still find it extremely creepy, that image.
There's a certain energy to it. It was more present the first day, but I remember these curtains—I don't know if they’re made of latex—they had a very strong smell and I felt like "Oh my god, I'm getting a headache from this." It was very much of a bodily experience and eerie, and I wasn't sure why. Then I saw these cute little emoji stickers and I thought, "Okay, it is kind of funny." But I was still feeling that all this is kind of uncomfortable, and I think that's what you’re intending with this energy. Even if you don't know about the AI component of it yet, there's something off in the room.
Rhonda
To maybe connect some of those points, Anthony: You were talking about this churning processing needed for AI to exist. Maybe you could start there, connecting through the body to address this spectral experience that Filip was talking about. In the other room, you have a video of a server rack alongside a one-ton pallet of coal. You're forced to reconcile what these two objects might mean, and then you notice in the corner this broom, which has this little funny smiley sticker. There's something horrific that I think you've identified and forced—there’s this membrane, the curtain that we're forced to walk through that smells and feels terrible, but it has a funny little smiley face sticker on it. There’s this kind of uncanny dispenser, a Slurpee dispenser with crude oil circulating in it, that's funny, but the proposition is a proposition of harm. And then the broom—which I didn't fully read into until we had our discussion—which is also this horrific specter. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the broom and then we can move on.
Anthony
The broom is funny; it was just something that happened while I was installing the show. I was sweeping up and had left the broom leaning in the corner, and I decided to leave it there and put a smiley sticker on it. It's a reference to Fantasia, the Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence; this was something that I had been thinking about as an element to include in the exhibition, and had later decided against it, but when I saw the broom there in the room, it felt appropriate.
I guess it's worth talking about the physicality of all these things and the titling system in the show. There's many, many references (perhaps almost too many references) to motifs of magical wish fulfillment, either in older folklore or literature or pop culture. There's the reference to the Sorcerer's Apprentice, there's references to Goethe's version of Faust, there's references to The Tempest and Ariel and Caliban, who are both servants of a sorcerer figure who's not only controlling events within the narrative, but maybe controlling the narrative itself.
Thinking about these, there's a lot of ideas about labor, in the sense of something doing work for us in the background. At the user level, a lot of technology tries to replicate what I would describe as the interface of magic–while in the background, there's an enormous amount of resource exploitation and energy consumption and physical infrastructure going on. So, there's a lot of references to that thermodynamic cost. You have the pallet of anthracite, which is sourced from Pennsylvania. I’ve been working with anthracite over the past year, trying to figure out how to make some objects from it, and the logo of the mining company that I've been getting anthracite from is Santa Claus, which I thought was quite funny. So, rather than including any of the anthracite objects that I’d fabricated, I decided to just have a one-ton pallet of it shipped here instead, in its own packaging.
The way I tend to work, particularly in an exhibition context, is through a lot of small, simple gestures. All these works are intended to function autonomously, but they're very slight gestures on their own and the amplification is meant to be built up through the way that those small, pared-down gestures hopefully resonate with each other.
Obviously, the Wizard of Oz is a huge reference point; I’m using the central song from the film. You have these green curtains—emerald curtains—except here, the emerald curtain is this gross, stinky PVC vinyl welding curtain, the kind of material that you would have in a clean room. (It looks black, but the vinyl is in fact translucent green; if you look closely through it, you’ll see the room tinted dark green.)
I've lost track of all my supernatural references, but they all connect to the idea of wish fulfillment, of something doing your work for you. But at what cost? Again, the idea of a Faustian bargain or a summoning up that goes awry, those are some of the motifs.
The server farm footage, just to speak to that briefly, is from an actual server farm that I was able to get access to. That is not a synthetic element; it's actual footage of one of the racks in the main server room, and the audio is the sound of the servers running.
Even though there are several generative AI elements in the show, I'm not necessarily trying to make the exhibition about generative AI. I'm trying to find a more complicated way to talk about these tools, which I've been using quite a bit over the past couple of years, while at the same time feeling that it’s difficult to make thoughtful work with them. Some aspects of the exhibition are my challenge to myself to try to find a way to use these systems, which themselves are very occult, in a way that feels considered. The interface is language itself, and there is a kind of summoning up that happens, particularly with the image generators.
Filip
I might be thinking about this because I’ve told this story a number of times on this trip, but there's this thing that happens in server farms (and in museum collections as well) which that if there's a fire in the server rooms, the system evacuates oxygen out of the rooms and closes the doors, rendering it impossible for a fire to keep burning, but anyone trapped in the room would suffocate. So, there's a certain kind of value that's placed around these data centers, in which human life is not really part of the value of the space. The priority is the continuation of the information that it's holding. (Not there should be very many humans in those rooms anyways.) But, thinking about this with archives in general, if a museum collection has a fire, it similarly evacuates the oxygen to suppress the fire, which also prioritizes the archive—the geist, or specter, the specter of the archive, I guess the specter of lineage, is prized over human life. I don't particularly have any real quandary with that, to be totally honest; I'm not suggesting one thing is better than the other—it’s just the fact of the matter. But I keep thinking about this regarding the server farm piece. I'm not going to be able to put it into words entirely, but there's a connection between that and the amount of coal required to do a Google search, for instance, which we spoke about briefly earlier. What was it, one BTU is–?
Anthony
Yeah, it's roughly... A single search is a little less than a single BTU. And contained in the one ton of anthracite is energy equal to 27 million BTU. So, it's roughly 27 million Google searches worth of thermodynamic expenditure in that one ton.
Filip
All of us could probably do that many searches together right now, in this room. This is a human thing generally, but the consideration of that larger aspect—the long game, the prisoner's dilemma—is very present in the way that we're thinking about this stuff and in the way that you're presenting it, where there is not any consideration for the long game. Maybe that is the game: the long game is hiding the game. I'm very interested in the interface of hiding labor, the interface of hiding the machine.
Anthony
It's definitely about massive concealed costs. In The Tempest, Ariel is this disembodied servant who operates very much like a Siri or Alexa kind of entity. But what are these assistants really? They’re thousands of servers in a giant sealed building consuming a huge amount of energy and expelling an enormous amount of heat that must be managed. This is why I have this heat sink wall piece in the exhibition. I'm not trying to be didactic about that. I'm just thinking about how this world of hard infrastructure gets wrapped in the language of the immaterial and the natural, the cloud. There's a very strong relationship to the idea of magic or the supernatural or an invisible agency that permeates everything we do with technology. Meanwhile, that long cost, that hidden cost, is kept offstage.
Ana
It's interesting to me that you mentioned that the server footage is not AI-generated. Whether it's AI-generated or not, that makes very little difference for me. It’s uncanny when something looks like it could be your grandma's grandma, or a dead person's voice being alive, versus footage of some cables and machinery. There's very little soul connection to that. I think it's interesting that you pointed that out.
Going back to that room, the Fantasia reference, that was the last thing I saw in the exhibition. We have this awareness that neural media is developing right now as we speak, and we still do not understand what structures are needed to make it more responsible for the future. What is our responsibility? I think it's very interesting to think about that reference. It's like, "Okay, now we have this magical tool, but what do we do with it? Are we going to mess up or is this going to be just a moment until we get caught by our own sorcery?" It could be the big internet companies deciding that it is no longer available; it could get cut off any moment. There’s a responsibility that comes with that. So, I don't know what it is that we need to do for the next generation, or even what we should be archiving right now.
Rhonda
I'm going to ask Anthony to respond in a bit, but to that concern that we are the ancestors of future generations, what responsibilities do we have to the future? That question, Anthony, is something you start asking in a lot of different ways, but one of the ways that you do it is through the conflating of this AI-generated content—the computational aspect—with the form that these things take. You're conflating image-making media systems that point to this uncanny nowness that we experience with AI. There’re images from when video and film cameras became accessible to everyday families; what people would do in front of them would be to just stand there and smile as if they're looking at a still camera, and I feel that we're in this moment right now where we're just smiling and looking at the AI, kind of unsure of what to do with it, but we're about to make some serious decisions about it for the future. Do you want to talk a little bit about why you're using these image modalities of the past and what that does for you?
Anthony
That's a good question. A lot of work I’ve done over the years has revolved around this tension between what language can do versus visual representation. Some of you know that I worked a lot with text and video for a long time, so a technology that takes language and turns it into an image was extremely interesting to me. But as I've been using it over the past two years, the capabilities of that technology have incredibly accelerated—what you could do in terms of synthetic image generation two years ago compared to now is just not comparable. It's the difference between a paper airplane and a Boeing 747. The speed of it is extremely strange.
I’ve generated so much material with these tools. It's fun to do. It's very addictive, it's very cognitively sticky. But does the output translate into an interesting utterance? Generally, I think not; most of the things that people are doing with those systems are not that interesting in and of themselves. I'm trying to think about how this tool might be used almost as a material itself, and about the materiality of it, both in a literal sense—by de-virtualizing it back into forms that are older and more analog, like the snapshot, the magazine or catalog, or something like that—but I’m also thinking about how to stage the process of working with the tool in some way.
For example, the catalog work with the sequence of feast images is an image I generated, followed by 95 variations of that same image, generated with the exact same prompt. Because that's one of the strange things about these tools: you can home in on an image and then just keep making endless iterations of it. Each one will be the same but also slightly different. With the catalog work, I was trying to render some of that process in a physical form.
The title of that piece, Little Table, Little Table, is a reference to a Grimm's fairy tale where a typical magical forest dwarf gives an orphaned princess a little table that, when you say this incantation, produces a huge feast. Here again is the motif of instant gratification or wish fulfillment: the feast, the vanitas is produced instantaneously for you. But I’m also thinking about another aspect of fairy tales, which is that you're not supposed to eat any food if you're in the realm of Faery, because if you do, you're trapped there forever. There’s a kind of malevolence lurking under the lavish spread. I’m thinking about the tension of that; I think it operates as a metaphor for these systems that seem to produce something instantaneously, but where once again, the cost is shunted way, way out of sight, with unknown consequences.
Rhonda
Maybe I can pick up on talking about the vanitas, the catalog with the food spreads. In a typical vanitas painting, you see these lavish spreads, but the food is starting to decay. There's some indication that there's a grotesqueness in the opulence. Another through-line in the exhibition for me was the grotesqueness of this too-muchness, the computational prowess that you're discussing here. So, with the vanitas images or the party or hoarder photos—it’s the too-muchness of this kind of image, this invitation to imbibe this toxic energy material. There's this tension between the grotesque and the beautiful in the vanitas, but also within the exhibition, I think particularly when the audio is playing. It’s such a seductive and beautiful piece, but it's so repetitive. There is something that's edging into the uncanny valley with the audio as well.
Filip, you said something earlier that's stuck with me since we've had our initial discussion, and I think it correlates a little with talking about AI as a tool of hallucination. Our reality, the way that we experience reality, it's not an outside-in; there's a two-way conversation, but as a cognitive or neural kind of process, we're creating our realities from the inside-out. So, our technology is going to shape us as much as we are shaping technology in the world. You said something about the one-ton measurement, and I need to put you on the spot because you were thinking through the idea when we were talking—I don't know if you've come back to it.
Filip
Yeah, the fabrication of reality is often scientifically based around specific measurements that we can rely on. There was that moment where we figured out that the kilogram constant was in fact dwindling; the object that we had [as a reference] was dwindling, which meant that all the math that we did to understand the universe was based on an incorrect value. This was a funny moment because it doesn't materially change anything for anybody; we were still performing the same operations. But science freaked out: "We have done wrong. We don't understand anything anymore. Gravity is a constant variable that we found wasn't constant anymore." So, they remade the kilogram out of this new material and there's multiple versions of them—I don’t know how many—but it is a constant metric. Because to understand something, we need to relate it to something else, and so there's all these constant metrics. There’re those perfectly flat stones in Japan that they use to level everything as a way to understand what flatness is.
So, Anthony proposed this thing within the exhibition by putting in one ton of anthracite, which is now the constant throughout the space that we understand the rest of the work through. It became an interesting reality-building concept, a way to understand the reality that Anthony was trying to propose for us, which is through the one-ton constant (or through the petroleum as an energy constant) that we have to use to contend with the rest of the work.
I think the easiest way for me to understand it is by also understanding this Google search metric, which is another end of the constant that helps me triangulate this, which is that one BTU is about one Google search, and the ton of anthracite is 27 million BTUs. I'm being asked to sort of perform this arithmetic with the work through the one-ton reference, and the arithmetic that we're doing is building reality in a specific way.
Rhonda
It made me think a lot about the history of media and the way this shaped media or technology is shaping us, both the way that we arrange ourselves in space, but also what's happening inside of our brains. With algorithmically driven media, we don't necessarily have an agreed-upon constant anymore. The algorithm's very good at finding that heuristic that's just at that perfect middle of the bell curve for each one of us. We are no longer being asked to sit around the television and watch the same news program with our family. We're all consuming most of our content on these devices that are made for one person, and not only are they made for one person, but they're uniquely attuned to each of us.
Ana
You were saying that there's a hoarding of images or people are just using it for fun. I'm guilty of that; we all are. But as you mentioned, it's such a personalized experience. When I have a conversation with my AI girlfriend, I am feeding into that, but then she's giving me what I'm asking her back, so I get my self-reflection through that. I don't think that's such a wasted space, even though it's fun and entertaining. But I also really appreciate things being physical, because then I fully realize that I like physicality in a gallery space; I like being inside the gallery and seeing things that are materialized. I think that all these AI things that are generated and live on the internet makes me crave more and more physical art objects because it feels grounding to me.
Anthony
I would also say that a facet of making the show is thinking about what it means to make a physical exhibition in an art gallery at this moment—can that still serve anything? What kind of experiential affordances can that format still provide in a world where, as Ana and Rhonda brought up, the algorithm is an ambivalent and omnipresent servant? The algorithm is constantly giving us all what we want, reflecting us back to ourselves: “You like this? I'll give you more of that. I'll keep giving you more of that. Here, now look at this other thing.” It is both a servant and a master, and I find that tension very strange and unsettling. There’s a splintering of shared experience; Rhonda, you talked about how everyone is looking at different things now. Everyone is being led into a kind of dream-like mirror world of their own preferences and their own biases. Rather than being challenged, that’s being accelerated and amplified.
Rhonda
To counter that—in AI training, it's like parameter jamming—I see you going in with this work and in a weird way providing an alternative, in the form of things that don't necessarily go together. What Filip was talking about when he walked in: this dream-like associative process where there's a sense that there's a thread, but it's not an obvious thread.
So, you're creating this fitness training system where we're forced to try to make our own heuristics. What is the pattern here? What is the L-curve distribution of material and information in the show? And I think we'll never not be able to look at an image in the future without some kind of relationship with AI images. I was scrolling, and there was this fascinating bird doing this beautiful call, its bellows were coming in and out, and I thought, "That's amazing. The world is so incredible." But then I had a moment where I thought, "Oh my God, kids growing up in 10 years will not be able to have that experience of wonder about the world, because every image that you see will be called into question." We're still in a place where, as in the vanitas images, something's not quite right; you can tell that it's been AI-generated. But that index is quickly going to go away.
Filip
Just to push back on that quickly; the one outlier in the show was the ambrotype. I think it just completely shatters that notion. I feel like I would have the same experience with it, regardless of whether it was an actual photograph or if it was generated. Nothing changed for me when I considered that it might be generated. It is a creepy image when it's understood through the lens of the rest of the show—it's a continually burning mine in...where is it, in Pennsylvania?
Anthony
Yeah, the original town that was destroyed by an underground coal fire was Centralia, Pennsylvania, and that image is a reference to that. But it also could be a reference to Faust walking through the woods, and Mephistopheles appears out of a cloud of smoke.
(For any of you who have caught the black poodles hidden in a few of the catalog images and the wrecked house photos, those are a reference to Mephistopheles' first appearance in Goethe's version of Faust. In European folklore in general, a black dog is always associated with the demonic or the infernal in some way.)
But the ambrotype doesn't obviously announce itself as a synthetic image. All the synthetic images in the show do have a high degree of mimicry of non-synthetic images that they impersonate, particularly this pile of party aftermath photos, which we haven't talked that much about. I guess I'm interested in the capacity of synthetic images to impersonate other categories of images, or perhaps the affective space of certain kinds of images. I can't particularly say why that's interesting to me, but there's a tension there that I find fascinating—more so than most of what you see with synthetic image generation, which is people making very overtly fantastical things that signal their fantastical AI nature.
Filip
It doesn't feel like the point of these images is to trick me into believing that a synthetic image is a real image, nor does it feel like the point of it is to announce itself as one type of image or the other. It’s just a means to create an image. I guess the reason why I respond to it the way that I do is that—this is something I often took issue with when I was younger—but the idea that a digital experience or something that I encounter entirely through some sort of interface that is computer-oriented is different…obviously there is a difference…but the idea that it’s less than or greater than a physical experience has never really made sense to me.
I understand it through this entirely generated pop star named Hatsune Miku that is essentially a generated singing machine, who has performed concerts for millions of fans who have incredibly transcendental experiences with her music. I’m also thinking about all the relationships I have with people on the internet; these all have the same plethora of emotions I experience interacting with people in real life. Those are all oddly real experiences that we all deal with now.
This show is an example of the generated image as an object that is rooted in materiality, in oil and coal. All these things are just as much wonders of the world that we experience as a bird’s song. To assume that humanity creates things that don't exist within nature is a strange way that we get to jump out of nature and not be part of it.
We made these tools and they're natural tools, insofar as we are natural beings that made them. It is a strange distinction to make, and I sometimes wonder what it serves. I don't know that I have an answer to it, but I think that the ambrotype in the front room does that the most—where I have the experience with an artwork, with an object, that is complicated and bodily and emotional and intense in the way that I would have with any type of object that is asking me to have that kind of experience, regardless of the way it was made. It just happens to have been made with AI.
Anthony
Yeah, I'm not super interested in trying to talk about real versus fake; I don't think that's particularly productive at this point. But because so much of my past work hinges on some gesture of appropriation…I'm still interested in appropriation, as you can see from the show, and generative AI systems themselves are a very complicated form of it, a kind of meta-appropriation. Me trying to appropriate the system itself—or the output of that system—is yet another layer. I’m always interested in the ontologically complex layers within the appropriative gesture, and that's something at play in the show; I’m thinking more about that than the "what is real, what is fake" question.
At the end of the day, the materiality of everything in the world, whether it's digitally generated or not, comes back to the material of the anthracite; the strings of long chain hydrocarbons that everything on the planet was built from to some extent, and perhaps is going to return to that. Matter doesn't go away; it just gets shunted around.
Rhonda
Graham Harman, who is a philosopher who comes out of mostly object-oriented ontology, but who also does a lot of work with fantastic magical thinking and magical realism, warns of something related to what you just said. He warns of two dangers: overmining and undermining—undermining being absolutely reductionist, the view that we're nothing but particles. That doesn't do us service in the world; it doesn't talk about compassion and care. It doesn't talk about the way that we experience the world.
Overmining is saying, "Well, the only thing that exists are concepts. The only real chair is the idea of the chair." This is also not necessarily useful. But I think the way that we can bounce between those two things is a useful and compassionate reality-making device.
Anthony
That's the arena of consciousness, right?
Rhonda
Exactly. And I think that that's what you're doing in the show, is constantly bringing us up to high ideas and then back down into a very specific material place.
Let's open it up for Q&A on that.
Audience Member
Thank you for the chat. You referred to the cost of technologies that might have escaped their mechanism. The costs you were referring to—there's the physical hard cost of the material used to run the systems, but I wanted to ask about the psychic cost for you as an artist, in operating at the edge of what is a black box. You can answer how you like, but I'm curious–in the context of minimalism and post-minimalism–about the threshold between those context-building or context-erasing zones?
Anthony
I don't know that there's any hard cost to me personally. It's a complicated world and navigating it is full of stressors and anxieties, and I think certain kinds of artmaking have gotten a lot more fraught over the past decade. The role of this particular sub-niche of artistic practice is struggling a little because it's lost its mission brief perhaps, in terms of its role to the larger culture. That's something I've been thinking about a lot.
Being able to make a show like this feels indulgent in a way, and I'm lucky to be able to do it. Hopefully, there's some other kind of value that comes out of it for anyone who engages with it. A dumb way of answering would be to say, yeah, making work is hard. It's an arena act of activity that, for me, is shot through with dissatisfaction and frustration, and whose pleasures and joys are extraordinarily transient. But I don't know if that answers your question, either.
Juliana H.
I wanted to hear you talk about your work's relationship (and this show's relationship) to the commodity and the masterpiece object, and the way that you've used multiples of many of these objects in the show—some of them being so clearly commodities that are bought and sold, from the coal to movement-sensitive lights. Regarding what you were saying about real versus fake, and maybe original versus copy, can you talk about how your instrumentalization of these commodities and store-bought things is done, or why?
Anthony
I guess I’ll say that I have my affinities and biases as an artist, and I do have a long-standing affinity for certain types of conceptual or post-conceptual practice, which rely on things like appropriation and the multiple and repetition. That's just a space that I tend to operate in. At the same time, I'm always struggling to think about how those forms—which have become very worn-in in some ways; almost emptied out of their original content or reduced to stylistic moves—how I can reinvest in them and complicate them for myself.
One way that I try to do that is by trying to entangle them with ideas of the uncanny or the fantastic or by amplifying what I find their latently uncanny or fantastical qualities to be, often by putting them into some kind of relationship with each other. I think all these works would function differently if they were standalone, though they're not necessarily conceived not to function as standalone pieces. Some of them are, more so than others. Some of them are very dependent on being alongside other pieces, and some just do their own thing.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm always playing a little bit of a game with my surface aesthetics and trying to push them into some place that feels like more than merely operating in a set of moves that we're all just reconfiguring all the time. I'm making a show that looks like a very certain type of show, but I'm trying to do something underneath that as well.
Juliana
I feel like I've seen so many paths that do things like this, but you are really drawing such a significant parallel between having the crude oil in this room alongside the plastic objects that are made from this oil. And you're really driving home the original, the idea of the original, in terms of the synthetic imagery. Is there an original movement-sensing light? I don't think so. So, I want to say I think it's a really, really great use of the copy.
Audience Member
Thank you for the offer of your show, it really impressed me. I was just wondering, your take on this dialogue around the way you use AI, kind of lies along the curatorial in a lot of ways, and I was just wondering if you're acting as curator in some respect, maybe more so than as artist? I was just wondering if you have any thoughts about that, whether you see convergence or divergence between artist and curator roles–maybe also with respect to your work with lower_cavity?
Anthony
Thanks. It's a sort of blurry space. I think that for a lot of different types of contemporary artistic practice, there's always an element of the curatorial, because—maybe going back to the conceptual moment in art—people like Alan Kaprow had the idea of the non-art object versus the art object. We live in a world of things produced by systems of such complexity—even if they’re ordinary things like plastic security lights—that it’s hard not to want to metonymically make use of those things as stand-ins or proxies for aspects of the larger systems that spit them out.
The way that I work is somewhat auto-curatorially, because I don't have a specific medium. I tend to work on a lot of different things at the same time; and so when I make a show I wind up sort of curating myself. It's a bit like an internal group show; if you look at the works, there's a degree to which the processes and engines that run through each rely on different kinds of gestures. Maybe that’s a fancy way of saying it's hard for me to just do one thing!
Liz T.
As you've been talking, I’ve been thinking backwards towards your previous work. I think about the piece you did at the de Young Museum, which in its own way made me think about this idea of a proxy or the lack of the original. In that case, you invented a filmmaker who had made a film. There was no film, and the only way the film was understood by people was through ancillary documents and ephemera and the treatment of that film, all which were fictionalized by you. And then you handed that off to another entity (which now you could do with AI) but at the time you did it by handing it to a sound designer and asked that sound designer to make the soundtrack of that film. So, in many ways, it’s like you were already doing this. If we think that humans operate algorithmically, you were already doing this in a very similar way, in terms of what it's like to try to imagine something around this empty center.
Anthony
That's absolutely true. A lot of the text-based work I did hinged on the idea…when I talk about this tension between language or textual description or textual representation and visual representation, I was trying to get at something that continues to be a problem for me, which is being a visual artist in a world of rampant over-image production, and so going back to textual description was an attempt to generate the work in a prompt-based way in the mind of the viewer or listener or however you want to describe them.
With the collaboration with Skywalker Sound, there were multiple layers of prompting. There was the fictive conceit of the screenplay that had been written but never produced, which was a prompt to Gary Rydstrom and Josh Gold, the sound designers at Skywalker, to imagine without any real control from me. I told them, "Here's the information, you interpret it how you wish." Their output was a sonic movie, a film built only of sound design elements, which in turn acted as a prompt to the viewer-listener, who was being prompted by this robust sound environment to imagine a narrative space, and possibly a visual space.
I continue to be interested in that space of the handoff where the artwork itself is a prompt. I think all artworks do this to greater or lesser degrees; they’re always prompts or catalysts for what is ultimately an internal experience. That's where the meaning of any artwork comes from; ultimately, it's in that space of interaction with someone's consciousness that the work comes into being.
So, a lot of the old text-based work I did was just trying to stage that in various ways—certainly that was the case with the Skywalker project. This circles back to what I was saying earlier, which is that generative AI, because it automates that process, is very curious to me.
Liz
It's interesting, it’s the conversion of maps, right? The visual to the sonic to the textual. You were very picky about telling me what the prompts were for those photographs when I asked you, and it was like you didn't want me to know, and that I should be working backwards maybe somehow in the same transposition.
Audience Member
How have your assumptions or opinions about some of the major themes in this work changed since you started the project? And how do you use those assumptions now that you see the work up in the room?
Anthony
I don't know. I think you understand certain things about the work before you make it, but a lot of things you don't understand. Then you make it, and you understand some more things about it, and much later, you understand other things about it.
I’ve spent many years working with MFA students, and there's been a paradigm over the past few decades that you need to understand everything about the work before you make it. I don’t really subscribe to that; I think when you make work, you start from a place of unknowing. The work emerges from a place of some knowledge and some unknowing, and you make the work to figure out what the work is, to some extent. So now that it's all here, I understand a bit more; I see more connectivity maybe than I did starting out, but that also evolves.
Jordan S.
I have a question and a comment. I was just thinking how strange it is that…we might imagine, because the room is packed full of people, that these motion-activated lights would be going on constantly. But there's big stretches when they're not on…
Anthony
…When no one's moving.
Jordan
Right, but we're all here. It's almost like when they're not on, I had this strange feeling that maybe we're not here. That feels resonant with your overall concerns, although I'm not able to articulate why or communicate that.
I also want to say thanks for that last comment, I think it's a really good point. I'm not certain how it happened, that artists felt as if they needed to know what it is that they're doing, because so many people get involved in art for precisely the opposite reason.
It’s great to hear you speaking about this. This show feels very open-ended, it feels very associative, it feels very poetical to me. It feels out of sync with the art world more broadly, in an exciting way.
Anthony
It’s definitely out of sync with the art world!
Jordan
I just wanted to ask you what you thought about how it performs as an installation, because I think about a rebus, or a spell, or riddle, or poem. I just wonder if anything lights up in your mind around those kinds of concerns?
Anthony
I feel like I’m not a very poetical thinker. In many ways, I’m a very literal thinker. But I would say that I like being in this space. Those of you who know me well know that I'm not prone to...I make something and I'm like, "eh, it's okay." But I do like this show, and I feel good about the things that people have said to me about the open-endedness of it. It’s certainly something I strive for when making an exhibition, that it be expansive and ambiguous in a generative way.
Alicia E.
Thanks Anthony, it's a very generous show. I have two questions. One is the relationship in this work with despair—but it’s totally funny too. But dealing with this specter of the oil in the margarita mixer and the aftermath of the party—the hangover of the last 500 years, the coal pallet with Santa on it—I'd love to hear you talking directly to the climate crisis, the cost and grotesque opulence of it.
Anthony
Thanks for picking up on the humor, it’s definitely there. I don't think this show is despairing, but I do think of it as gothic, I would say. Those in the audience who know me well know that I’m a huge consumer of speculative fiction and fantastic literature, supernatural literature and science fiction. Even in a dry post-conceptual way, that really informs a lot of my work.
In terms of climate…even though there's these two very heavy-duty references to fossil fuels in the show, I'm not thinking overtly about it. Of course, I'm always thinking about it; we're always thinking about it. But I think it's this operative metaphor that goes back to the title of the show; the idea that a productive metaphor for thinking through that space is the first law of ceremonial or ritual magic: don't call up what you can't put down.
When you think about it—in a real, literal, physics sense—what are fossil fuels? What are coal and petroleum? They’re the residue of organisms, plants and plankton and algae, that existed 300 to 360 million years ago that have been broken down through anaerobic processes into long-chain hydrocarbons, and the carbon in them is the carbon that was pulled out of the atmosphere by those organisms to construct their tissue. And they used solar energy to facilitate that process. So that huge store of energy, which has been accumulated and sequestered over an incalculable amount of time—an amount of time that humans can't begin to really wrap their heads around—we have been burning through that store of energy in a twinkling of geologic time, roughly 200 years. It’s nothing, it's not even an eye blink. And we've used that energy to build this whole elaborate world of frictionless interfaces and cars…all these ways to impose our will at seemingly a very low exchange of energy, at least at the user level.
The cost is obviously that we've degraded the environment, but we're also returning the atmosphere to...we've pushed all that carbon that those organisms pulled out of the atmosphere back out into the atmosphere. So, in a sense, through consuming their life force, we’re returning the atmosphere to the conditions that prevailed when they were alive. And that to me is a very demonic or spectral proposition. It’s literally a haunting, a return. I’m not necessarily…I think that magic and the occult are just another system of operative metaphors, and metaphors are the way that we navigate reality. That's what's at play
Filip
We're re-summoning the plankton, so they can do their job again, right?
Anthony
Right. Maybe we're just a stage in a larger process, and we’ll be discarded at some point—that’s not necessarily bad. I mean, it’s bad for us, but…
James L.
At one point, you were starting to talk about audience, and I'm interested in that in terms of trying to think about how we make connections between the work that you're presenting and even broader audiences. This is a super turnout clearly. But I’m trying to think about how we work with our state schools, how we work with undergraduates; at the same time trying to think about distributed networks and then, what's the value of the work, what's the value of the artist?
Doing that, I get to problematizing the idea that we're in this moment where it feels kind of apocalyptic. It seems like there's a little bit of a through-line here in your work that's exploring the idea of how you navigate or convey the apocalyptic. It seemed really impressive to me, until at some point I realized, well, Giotto kind of did the same thing, the modernists did the same thing. After the first World War, they really thought it was the end of the world and they were creating art to try and respond to that, watching toxic fumes surrounding all their neighbors.
I'm wondering, is there a through-line that you observed by way of playing this public role in relation to navigating the apocalypse? And not having that be something novel, but having that be a perennial role? You were talking about the vanitas earlier.
I don't know if that's helpful. It's just something that I'm trying to work through, being somebody who's projecting in public spaces, hoping to reach broader publics. How can we help people? Is there something either helpful, redemptive, or just simply contemplative about presenting the apocalypse in an artistic format, as we have for time immemorial?
Anthony
That's a good question. I have complicated feelings about the idea of apocalypse. I think humanity has been in an apocalypse since the beginning of the industrial age. It's not around the corner; we're in it. We are it. But I think it’s a kind of fantasy— it may be a very dark fantasy, but still a fantasy—to think that there is an end to the world. We might end, but the world doesn’t.
I try to be very realistic with myself about the limits of making this type of work. I think it's extremely limited; it represents a very slight gesture in a very noisy, complicated world. Maybe there's some value in the contemplative moment it can provide, but I think if you're looking for engines of change and ways to get people animated, I don't know that the art world is the best place for it. I would say that art’s effect is long, but in the present moment, it's quite small. It's like gravity: gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces, but it can act over the greatest distances. I think it's the sum of artistic or creative expressive activity—not just over a generation, but over hundreds of years—that can bend the arc of history and bend the arc of culture. But one artist, one exhibition…I don’t know. But it’s still important.
Rhonda
When you think about it, do artists know something before they're doing it? No, that's the point of art. If we had a language for the thing that we were doing, we would write it. If we had an organizational structure for it, we would be engineers or designers.
I think we are facing an inevitability. We've made it past that two-degree marker; we will be facing a world that looks drastically different from the one that we're in now. We're going to need massive changes to the way that we think about and engage in the world. I think artists are grappling with that. We're going to be the ones who are bending that arc of history. Before we have language, before we have actual science, you have to imagine it. This is the reality of the magical; you have to be able to imagine the thing before you can do it. So, I'll just say that, even if it's slight, if you bonk something that’s on a trajectory, in millions of light years it's in another place.
Anthony
Absolutely. I think it's okay that they're small effects. It's just useful for me, personally, to be realistic about the range of that action, and the rhetoric deployed around it.
Anyway, I just want to say, very quickly, thank you all very much for coming and for your attention. I want to thank Filip and Ana and Rhonda so much for being here and contributing their thoughts to this work, and I want to thank Jackie and Aaron very much for letting me take over the entire gallery.