The Human Image
I suppose we are looking for an image of the human within technology. We are looking for it because to not find one is unsettling. Why? Because without one our inherited culture does not make sense.
The long history of culture is analogue. The cult in culture is built on analogy: uman intellect continually observes that one thing is like another, generally or in some specific detail. From here it habitually twists the screw, elevating comparison to metaphor. The latter populates mythic systems: the sun is a crown. Zeus is a cuckoo. Ganesh has the head of an elephant… Analogue culture stages a continuum of metaphors that must be navigated by narrative. In this respect, it is dramatic.
The human ‘self’ is an emergent property of this dramatic continuum. It is its trans. Binary code is the opposite, resisting analogy and metaphor. It operates according to the logic of either/or: zero or one. There is no one that is like a zero, and there is no zero that is a one. Thus, translating human life into binary leaves no space within which an undefined self may repose. This profane truth lurks behind every like on social media: a yawning disjunction, void of humour. Of course, we may still craft images on the surface of the application, use our language, paint our pictures. But we feel an abyss below.
Were it only a cosmic void, left behind after the death of god, we might be ok. Enough time has passed for other accounts to have been opened, whether in the name of chaos (a Big Bang, for instance) or our own. Until recently, we entertained ideas that the canvas of nothingness might be signed with élan. No more. Today, even authorship of existential absurdity is displaced by the machine: We may have invented the algorithm but it goes on to write the script. It speaks of things, and to them. It says yes, and it says No.
And the computer sees. It recognizes patterns in paintings and sculpture. Sometimes it sees geometry. Did historical authors imagine things this way? Even if they did, they left behind no vector diagrams like the ones underpinning Iconographies. And, if earlier critics might have identified the principle of a serpentine line within a colourful scene, the machine sees more — a network of triangles latent in Rubens’ Tiger Hunt. So it is — what Quayola’s machines see undercuts both the historical artist and the historical reception of their work. They picture something else. Claiming that a critic saw it too, in his mind’s eye, begs a proof that only the algorithm can supply.
But what is the machine’s status vis-à-vis art? Are its creations a reduction of the art concept to technical output — thereby assaulting the necessity of the (human) artist? Or, do the works in this book inscribe the machine within an uncanny valley, wherein it (an algorithmic system) vies for the position of artist? If we must consider an assemblage of software and hardware to be some kind of emerging artistic voice, then does this make Quayola its assistant — or tool?
The last one is tricky. But perhaps the most obvious critical frame — the artist’s biography — is helpful. If Quayola assists then it is by choice. He is Roman. As such, he lives amid an accretion of antiques and cultural heritage. In Italy this is a recipe for academicism or its inversion — schools of ‘the new’ that attempt to break free from the past. It is tempting to view Quayola in terms of the latter, as a kind of neo-Futurist, wrecking the venerable museums; qua Nietzsche, philosophizing with a hammer (or drill). But as someone who has lived through the passing of Modernity, Quayola is well aware that starting from zero is a conceit. Thus, he acknowledges the existence of his own mental furniture (or cultural baggage), assured that it can be re-arranged. Living in the shadow of Constantine’s Arch — that agglomeration of spolia; art made out of other art — Quayola knows that perhaps it can even become more than itself.
Is it not obvious — ‘his’ work seems to ask — that digitizing an important analogue art object allows for its re-animation; conveys a more vigorous mode of un-death? All the things that an ancient sculpture could be — the possible limbs that it might have, the way it might sustain the projection of a geometric plane in a certain direction, beginning here and ending there — are (historically) unsaid. Does their saying re-animate the original, so that more of the historical work is revealed, in some way? In fact, the outcome is opposite — ‘Quayola’ casts a veil over the thing, so that supplementary projections can play out on its surface.
He is also screened off. Just as the old and the ancient are figured with new limbs, faces, and colours in ‘his’ work — so, with Quayola, does the death of the author mutate in line with contemporary technology. When one touches up a picture on Photoshop there is still a role for the hand. At the very least, what you do and what you see appears bound by a tangible relation. However, our posthumous ‘Quayola’ generates something that can generate another thing, and another thing, and so on. The algorithm is the actor. It may keep on expressing itself indefinitely. It creates sculpture after sculpture; (temporally speaking) one painting after another. Of course this expression is informed by Quayola’s choice. But to the viewer he is unseen. He hides his face, his hands. As such, ‘Quayola’ proposes sculptures that are, in terms of the latent author concept, after Sculpture; additionally, art after the artist’s exit.
‘Quayola’ stands for more than just the man. He is the absent human. In staging his death (as an artist) ‘Quayola’ points towards our own passing — labour-erasure by computers, or subjective inscription within technical systems that extract and reconfigure without emotion. So, for all the distracting colours and mythic components, ‘his’ art allows some economic political drama: consider Michaelangelo’s Slaves. It is compelling to consider the figures somehow latent in the stone. Perhaps more so, to imagine their creator’s deep artistic intuition, projecting a form so powerfully into the marble that it seems as though he were actually reading it out of this material. In this view, the artist-ego is form-giving. And of course it is also self-making. Now, try to imagine a humane figure naturally latent in a bloc of polystyrene.
It is not just in the pictorial sense that machines figure humans. Algorithms create their own portraits which — behind the screen/interface — establish bizarre doppelgangers for you and I, alternatives to everything in historical image cultures that were traditionally used to ground identity, morality and so on. If there is a real person being released from a block of foam one suspects that it is an Amazon worker and not a god-hero. This sensibility must have some bearing on why ‘Quayola’s art’ continually engages high water marks in humanism, antiquity, and expression (such as the work of the Impressionists), only to subject them to radical formal alteration. The bass notes in this iconographic chord are prelapsarian in order to set up the ultimate incommensurability of the higher ones — emerging/gestating behind the mask. These others are what the machine sees of us, in its own terms; a vision which can reproduce and develop over time without requiring that we ever make any sense of it.
All of this weighs on the question of how similar (or interchangeable) human and computer modes of perception and representation are, or can become. Is the brain like a computer? Can you train AI to see and ‘paint’ like a person? Do computers see the way Merleau-Ponty thought we do? Does ‘Quayola’s’ art naturalize computer perception or suggest that computer models of the mind are more adequate than we might have imagined? This is the setup for the viewer’s meditation, in front of a dazzling screen, upon whose surface shifting colours move, taking on forms, losing them, drawing out a little piece of genius, into a dimension where it seems to crystallize, and simultaneously disappear. In their presence, the viewer entertains the notion that these ways of seeing are always latent possibilities for machine perception. On this model, the algorithm is a good simulation or model of the human mind. Agreeing to this has consequences. In doing so, a fundamental question about where artistry happens opens up. It is a question whose stakes are nothing less than the human image itself.