(Cut Art Gallery, 15 July 2023)
Pundits and essayists profess to be threatened by AI's superior intelligence. What is really threatening, though, is rationality: intelligence consistently applied in pursuit of a well-defined goal. Cities and polities are more complex than people, and yet many people are brave enough to belong to a polity and live in a city. This is because cities and polities are not rational. They are kludgy and inconsistent. They are slow to adapt and slow to exploit and, therefore, are less threatening. People are quick enough to run away from a rotting city or a corrupt political regime. Not so with the the imminent AI overlords. And hence, "I find it very difficult to understand what is going on these days" (a title of a lithograph from the exhibition).
Suicidal fantasies is the coping mechanisms of choice for some of those who are faced with the anxiety owing to the impending singularity. Perhaps, there is comfort in imagining the worst case and in doing the imagining in company. There is the illusion of control in planning to bring this worst case upon oneself instead of just sitting there and waiting for something to happen, even if that something would not be quite as bad. "Alice thinks about suicide." The masses dream of degrowth.
Those who don't, seek comfort in the deliberate sensation of staying alive, in spite of the odds. They insist on existing, on constantly pushing through the resistive medium, with one's body ("Man in the rain," "Woman rising"), with one's mind ("Woman obscured by cloud," "Woman w/ abstraction"). They create.
To be creative is to have an interesting conversation among multiple people inside one's head. One may be quite disturbed by the cacophony of the voices inside one's head and seek to silence all but at most one of them. "I fix my head." One should resist this temptation. One does not want to kill the conversation.
Creative work can be fully understood only in relation to the bodies of other people. "Two figures dance by a tree with a ladder."
