NFTs
After the Rise of AI and NFTs, Some Top Art and Tech Artists Unplug
ONE OF THE STRANGEST FEELINGS In my recent memory, it occurred after a week off, not just from work, but from my computer as a whole, the longest I’ve ever spent without it in my adult life. No laptop meant no typing, and when I returned to the keyboard, my fingers found common typing movements strange. It made me want to disconnect in a deeper way – and I’m not the only one. I felt a sense of relief when I saw the mold that artist Faith Holland has loosened on her battered laptops and smartphones, allowing it to slowly corrode the devices, in her recent “Death Drive” exhibition at the Microscope Gallery in New York.
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Recently, some of today’s most compelling artists and writers – big names in the 2010s art and technology scene like Holland, as well as Hito Steyerl and Ryan Trecartin – have been questioning the ubiquity of seemingly inescapable consumer technology, looking ahead to history, based on the premise that somewhere along the way humanity went wrong. They’re going Paleolithic, Amish, or back to earth. Holland’s 2015 solo debut at Transfer Gallery in New York, “Technophilia,” included a series of videos that she uploaded to a porn website and also showed at the gallery. In them, she played with the internet’s misogynistic logic: porn with feminist twists, including one of Holland preparing to give oral sex but instead turning around to suck the camera: she consumed the gaze that was ready to consume her .
Four prints from the series “AI Forced to Confront Its Own Death”, by Faith Holland, 2023, on display in the exhibition “Death Drive”, 2023, at Microscope Gallery, New York. Courtesy of Microscope Gallery, New York
“Death Drive” marks a shift from playing with the rules of technology to operating them against technology itself: Holland describes the show as emerging from the pandemic, from experiencing mass death online in the form of Zoom funerals and depressing infographics. She became aware of the thousands, if not millions, of years these devices will outlive humans and decided to help speed up the process.
She also trained an AI to “grow” (generate images of) mold, which she printed on aluminum, her logic being that “by teaching an AI system to reproduce mold, it could also prepare the technology to imagine its own organic death.” ”
In the 2010s, Steyerl and Trecartin were trying to carve out space for the democratic ambitions of the early Internet – harnessing this tool’s power to distribute access, information and voice in an ostensibly egalitarian way – while also inviting skepticism about the ways in which Various platforms monitor us and can also reproduce inequality. Steyerl is considered an authority on the social impacts of technology: in the 2010s, she produced dialogue-changing films and essays that attempted to show how opaque technological systems and the ideologies they embodied worked. Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s exclusive hour(s) multi-channel videos have captivated the art world at once with such frenetic energy that viewers often feel exhausted just watching one. The duo’s practice captured how endless push notifications and countless open browser tabs can produce ADHD symptoms in even the most chemically balanced brains. They managed to convey the excess of it all and left viewers painfully aware of the fact that there is now more images and data being captured and regurgitated online than the human mind can comprehend. Perhaps it was inevitable that they would lead the way offline.
BUT LIKE THE DECADE came to an end, something changed: Critics, myself included, were perplexed by Steyerl’s 2019 show at the Park Avenue Armory, in which she appeared as a journalist in an installation about gun violence in the United States that featured well-known news figures. And as her writing began to blur absurdity and authority in ways that didn’t always translate—and seemed irresponsible in the age of misinformation—an Artspace headline about her essays from the same year asked, “What is she talking about?”
Whether in response to such criticism or of her own volition, she changed things dramatically. She abandoned that authoritarian tone and returned to the absurdist roots found in her best works, such as How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) and Liquidity Inc. (2014). In their new video, Animal Spirits (2022), a group of artists fantasize about giving up and becoming shepherds. They are inspired by Nel, a former historian who left the city to become a “quantum” pastor (whatever that means) and an eco-influencer. Nel paints her face to avoid detection by autonomous surveillance drones and makes rants against ecofascists, “Disney ecologists” and NFT brethren. The self-described “desperate artists” gather on Zoom to lament the fact that their shows are being postponed indefinitely due to Covid-19 and that their interest in the rat race is waning. They lean toward the more enjoyable aspects of lockdown life, like being alone and slowing down.
View of the installation Animal Spirits, by Hito Steyerl, 2023, in the exhibition “Contemporary Cave Art” at Esther Schipper, Berlin. Photo Andrea Rossetti/Courtesy Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin, Paris and Seoul
The group of artists – played by real artists Steyerl, Liam Gillick, Rabih Mroué and James Bridle – conspire to audition together for a reality show called Shepherd School. Halfway through the play, everyone is categorically rejected. Mockery of the blockchain and the metaverse follows: In the metaverse, animals fight to the death and “Every time an animal is burned, an NFT is minted and registered on the blockchain as a unique digital asset.” A group of pastors get fed up with the “animal gladiator metaverse shitshow” (and, it is implied, the notorious environmental effects of blockchain). So they create their own exchange system: Cheese Coin. A narrator “explains” that cheese is what happens when milk turns to stone and seeks immortality. Like many technospheres, it’s just its own circular logic and looks silly from the outside. At Documenta 15 and Esther Schipper in Berlin, Steyerl showed the video as part of a mind-bending installation: herbs in spheres hanging in the terrarium were connected to sensors. When a visitor’s movement triggered a sensor, it instructed an AI to animate Paleolithic cave paintings projected on the wall.
Even before Steyerl changed course, Trecartin and Fitch in 2016 moved their studio from Los Angeles to rural Ohio, where they built a compound on a 32-acre property dotted with a giant lazy river. Their exhaustion was palpable at “Whether Line,” their 2019 show at the Prada Foundation in Milan, where they set up a prefabricated barn inside the museum, leaving half the space empty. To get to the barn, we had to navigate winding pillars, as if we were in a long roller coaster line, without the crowds. Inside the barn, a video took viewers into some version of the artists’ lives in Ohio, where disillusioned technology abandoners, a rural queer community and Amish neighbors feuded. (Trecartin plays a rural Amish woman named Neighbor Girl.) The various parties dispute things like loud music and property lines; one neighbor registers another as “historic”, as if it were a building. This means she must ask permission to change even the way she waves hello. It’s not a romantic vision of the simple life, but still, a pink-haired person explains, “that’s why we’re here in the countryside, to enjoy it, to reverse the curse.”
View of the exhibition “Lizzie Fitch | Ryan Trecartin: Be Line”, 2019 at Prada Foundation, Milan. Photo Andrea Rossetti/Courtesy Prada Foundation, Milan
THE BACKGROUND TO These artists’ recent works have been a general disenchantment with technologies that have lost their initial promise. The New York Times recently reported on the “Luddi Teens” of Brooklyn, a group of young people who are leading the “smartphone liberation movement.” Twitter, whose predecessor was a DIY invention of protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention, is now a billionaire’s toy, its content having degenerated from free speech to disinformation along the way.
At the same time that Steyerl, Trecartin, and Fitch were altering their trajectories, author Tao Lin, who once turned tweets and emails into novels, was working on his 2021 novel, Leave Society—a piece of autofiction about recovering the symptoms of the “dominator”. society.” Lin borrowed the term from Riane Eisler’s classic 1980s book The Chalice and the Blade, which distinguishes partnership societies—primitive cultures that worshiped goddesses and nature—from domineering or patriarchal societies like ours. ( It turns out that in real life Lin didn’t leave society, but was canceled – first for questionable behavior with a 16-year-old when he was 22, and again for anti-vaccine preaching on Twitter.)
The Leave Society accuses Google of having “natural health sites censored, banned and blacklisted because their parent company since 2015, Alphabet, had ties to pharmaceutical companies,” and calls Wikipedia a tool to “aggregate[ing] the mainstream.” Lin’s protagonist, Li, decides to stop just looking things up online after realizing that “at some point public education taught him that everything was already figured out, that new discoveries would be in the news.” Instead, he tries to approach the physical and natural world around him with openness and curiosity.
Writing in the New Yorker, Andrea Long Chu accused Leave Society of “naïve prelapsarianism,” an attitude that David Graeber and David Wengrow brilliantly analyze in their 2021 book, The Dawn of Everything, a search for the origins of inequality. The two anthropologists looked at anthropological studies of Neolithic societies like Çatalhöyük (also one of Lin’s favorites) and found examples of cities (not nomadic cultures) that thrived before implementing any hierarchical social orders. They conclude that, from the beginning of time, our ancestors were self-conscious political actors. Some narratives believe that when agriculture emerged and brought with it the division of labor – that is, not everyone had to spend their time securing food, but they were free to do other things, such as making art – this caused inequality, which is the unfortunate price of a sophisticated society. They argue, instead, that it was people – not agriculture, or any other invention – who caused inequality. “If something has gone terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it is hard to deny that something has happened,” they write, “then perhaps it started to go wrong precisely when people began to lose the freedom to imagine and Act. other forms of social existence.”
As much as we dream of reversing human “progress” – and these artists are in fact offering dreams, as their projects still require participation in the world of art and collaborations with technology – there may be other, more viable movements. If Graeber and Wengrow are right, technology does not determine the course of history: people do. As long as the robots don’t go rogue…