The Tamesis
Whenever a tech company promotes an emerging technology like artificial intelligence or virtual universes, the pitch sounds the same: a promise to “unleash” the imagination, or a new “immersive world.”
When Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021, its ads showed four people watching the work of Henri Rousseau fight between tiger and buffalowhen it suddenly woke up, a portal opened in front of them. Four years later, when Meta first launched its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, the company promoted its in-lens display and voice-activated features with an ad featuring Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt looking at Maurizio Cattelan’s glasses. comediannamely a banana, which Hemsworth promptly ate. What does it say about our collective consciousness that the direction of technological innovation always seems to lead to that scenario? Mary Poppinswhen Nanny and her wards jump on chalk paint and end up in the world of animation? This question is at the heart of several works by Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS) earlier this month.
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Located in what was once William S. Burroughs’ loft on the Bowery, GPS hosted “Exert: The Physics of Metaphysics,” a three-day program in early May with the goal of, in the words of artist and curator Mark Leckey, “giving the Internet a body.” In the exhibition plan, Leckie writes that he believes the only difference between machine intelligence and human intelligence is that “our physical selves, not that consciousness can only be embodied (maybe), but that our bodies carry a different type of knowledge, called gnosis, must be noted. It is the body that tells you when you are in the right place, time, and company.”
As I walked into the event line and watched couples pass under the wrought iron gates that led to the GPS, I definitely felt like I was in the right place. Inside, crowds settled under the loft’s low roof, shuffling on the patterned rugs to find seats, buy a can of beer, or use the single bathroom. A golden shrine was pushed into the corner of the room to make way for a projector and a comically large sound system. This was the second day of the event, which included a reading by novelist Hari Kunzru, a performance talk by critic Gideon Jacobs, a drumming performance by drummer Jay, a Deli Girls concert, and a screening of some of Leckey’s short films. In the works of Kunzru and Jacobs, both of whom are still “works in progress,” the artists seem to be asking the same question: What’s the use of reality in an age of constant simulation?
Kunzru took to the podium and read an excerpt from a novel he was working on. In it, a young man is exploring a world where simulation seems to be seeping from every corner. He’s hired to attend a tech party and must endure a lecture from the founder about the virtual reality technology he’s launching, or else, while he’s with his friends, he notices that the physics of the world around him don’t seem to be working properly. His friends try to comfort him as he suffers from the collapse of reality.
“Do you feel bad when you believe something is fake?”
“Well, yes,” he replied.
“You know you can forget about it, right?”
Feelings or truth, beliefs or facts: which axis should we prioritize? experience When reality seems so fluid? Should we put VR glasses on cows to make them happier while producing milk, or should we let them experience the horrific conditions of factory farming because it’s real? If we make things better by providing a simulation, will the underlying conditions change? People think that simulation, whether through VR, AR or AI technology, is abnormal because it is too soothing. Do we really need just images?
Jacobs addresses this issue in his performance lecture “All Images Are Useless,” which incorporates various types of creative production. There is a monologue in his play, Image: a performanceexcerpted from his spike The article “What is the Image Now?”, a guided meditation that contains artificial intelligence video work produced by Cassandra Jenkins, and a website produced by him and his brother. The site, which viewers watch through a projector, automatically transcribes Jacobs as he reads his article, then converts portions of the transcription into prompts and then into images. It was a strange experience that messed with my brain. He could talk, but part of me couldn’t listen; the constant flow of images seemed to pull my ability to think right out from under me. As Jacobs describes Lacan’s theory that infants initially form a cohesive group I An image of a baby looking into a cracked mirror appeared on the screen as their reflection was seen. Often lacking such a clear subject, the generator can only produce images of a person talking and others listening around them, or of a (white, male) professor sitting at his desk or drawing calculations on a blackboard. The setting of these images has a post-apocalyptic bent in a young adult novel kind of way. Abandoned buildings with peeling paint, rain-soaked cobblestone alleys, charred papers and yellowed desktop computers are common sights. If Jacobs mentions a word related to spirituality or religion, it inevitably produces a scene of a desert landscape complete with robed men.
Sometimes, however, generators come up with truly poetic interpretations. The generator flashed images of the barn’s interior as Jacobs described the difference between photos created with light and images created in the darkness of a data center. The barn walls are open, so it’s shady inside, but outside you can see a bright field. In the foreground, a thick rope is split in half by an invisible force, and where the rope is torn, the remnants of the burst bubbles scatter the air in furry iridescence. Be inspired.
I was struck by the difference in these different types of “immersion.” As Kunzru read, I “saw” the world he described so vividly that when faced with Jacobs’s Rorschach test of response-generated images, I felt as if there were flies blocking my view. Jacobs’s work, while not “immersive,” is still an incredible piece of work that has less to do with artificial intelligence and more to do with the coordination of image, text, and sound. It was fragmented and overly reactive, leaving no room for my personal semiotic process to produce its own images based on what I was hearing, nor the kind of harmony that would allow me to simply fall into the flow of the narrative. This is where the promise of analog technology often fails: more images doesn’t necessarily mean more immersion.
While the ability to mechanically create images has indeed reached faster than light speeds since the invention of the camera, we have always been an image-making species. Although I would not venture to speculate on what goes on in the minds of animals, the process of semiotics (the generation of meaningful symbols) is considered a specifically human activity. In his seminal essay “Logic as Semiotics: A Theory of Signs,” the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce describes the process by which humans generate symbols by presenting us with a typical imaginary scenario: A person begins to desire something, and then he follows this desire with a question: Can I have it? To answer this question, he began to “search his own heart,” that is, to imagine the steps he would have to take to get what he wanted. The utility of imagination can be seen as the origin of another side of imagination: our ability to imagine the impossible, and by imagining the impossible we bring much life and death into the world. Images of heaven often come to mind.
In tech ad copy, “immersion” means not being immersed in our world, but being immersed in another world. It’s a fantasy otherworld where people are chosen for infinite love, never-ending life, cosmic pursuits, and incredible joy. In the politics of images, perhaps the question is not so much the difference between reality and simulation, but where our desires lie. Maybe the political image is born out of a desire, not for heaven or fan fiction, but for inhabiting this The world is inherently flawed and fleeting.
