Just what is it that makes AI homes so different, so appealing?
Over a year-and-a-half ago, we began an email chain discussion with the artist Jason Isolini, proposing a collaboration that would instrumentalise his experiments in equirectangular photography as a new venue for the group exhibition. Early stages of the project took shape under the provisional title Just what is it that makes AI homes so different, so appealing?, however, in May 2021 it would finally come to light as The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole with help from Joseph Ian Henrikson at anonymous gallery in New York City.
Throughout the entire production phase of The Terminal we have stumbled articulations of what the work is, combinations of words jumbling against one another forming semi-legible strains that fail to accurately capture what has been created. We have relied on terms such as “cyclical” or “looping” to explain that the film has no definitive start or end point; complicated by the “360°” format that created a spherical echo of the circular journey. At times we would call it “VR” or “Virtual Reality” to expand the acronym, but recognise within an arts context this has more often than not become associated with environments built within gaming software; and the phrase “group show” stuck in our teeth, requiring embarrassing teasing out to qualify how one work contains within it the work of ten further artists. All this before the conditional addition that in it’s premier installation The Terminal was not shown via VR headset, but rather due to Covid (and maybe for the better) displayed within a suspended geodesic dome using a DLP projector reflected into a security mirror…
…you can begin to see why we have had trouble.
So, within this article it becomes our aim to again stumble towards a better definition, likely falling short in some aspects but capturing others more succinctly. Specifically, we will remain focused on the curatorial and architectural characterisation of The Terminal and the exhibition format it has newly initiated, building through two- to three- and four-dimensional aspects. For an in depth understanding of the photographic medium the piece is built upon and within, you would again be much better served by seeking out Jason Isolini and his recent writing on what he has coined the ‘Image Sphere.’
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2D
“The Aware Home, like many other visionary projects, imagined a digital future that empowers individuals to lead more-effictive lives. What is most critical is that in the year 2000 this vision naturally assumed an unwavering commitment to the privacy of individual experience… Today these rights to privacy, knowledge, and application have been usurped by a bold market venture powered by unilateral claims to others’ experience and the knowledge that flows from it.” — Zuboff, S. (2019) ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.’ Hachette Book Group.
By strange coincidence, the night before beginning this writing, we opened the first pages of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and found she had entitled her opening chapter ‘Home or Exile in the Digital Future.’ This might have been an apt subtitle for The Terminal and indeed may still be for some upcoming iteration. Beyond past experience and Isolini’s demonstrable innovative excellence, we had approached him with a specific reference in mind, one we knew mapped well with his practice and in particular the thematics of a ZIP exhibition titled A Spime we’re living in? that he had launched with us in December 2018. That reference was Richard Hamilton’s iconic collage made as the poster for the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition This Is Tomorrow in 1956.
Composed of images sourced mainly from America magazines: Ladies Home Journal provided the sitting room and staircase; Tomorrow’s Man included the image of Irvin Koszewski, winner of Mr. LA in 1954; the framed comic cover comes from Young Love; the Earth on the ceiling from Life Magazine, etc, Hamilton’s image exemplifies Pop Art’s repurposing of materials but also speaks to the manner in which British Pop Art would look to the United States as a cultural figurehead for the mid-20th century and a post-war optimism. With this history loosely in mind, Just what is it that makes today’s home so different, so appealing? initially served as a guiding-star for the collaboration, it too is a group show of sorts with the source of each fragment a matter of art historical investigation, it too imagines the future home, recognising the radical changes brought about by a new phase of capitalism, and most importantly it too identifies the United States as leading these cultural shifts.
Now as then, within a Western sphere at least, the United States forms the forefront of neoliberalism and innovation in AI technologies that will and are reshaping employment and the domestic arena. At its conceptual core, The Terminal is an exquisite corpse of reactions to this new reality, collectively forming an unnerving and repetitious daily cycle in which the boundaries between home and work have completely eroded. During the writing of this text, a study by University College London concluded that the smartphone was “perhaps the first object to challenge the house itself (and possibly also the workplace) in terms of the amount of time we dwell in it while awake,” referring to the device by a newly coined phrase, the “transportal home.” Extending this conclusion, the smartphone is as much a device of familial and peer connectivity as it is an access point for work to intervene within our wider life. If it truly represents the “place where we live”, then the place we live in is a mixed domestic labour context.
Beyond this sense of overlapping and contracting space (both physically in terms of square footage and into a device), The Terminal wove concerns addressing the advent of an AI Industrial Revolution. Efficiency and ease have become marketing tools of Web 3.0 corporations, with predictive systems streamlining our lives by filling in the blankety blanks to shave valuable seconds, in exchange for the behavioral surplus data they need to algorithmically determine our actions. Seemingly a symmetrical exchange these processes form the backbone of new knowledge and wealth asymmetries, ones which Zuboff chronicles. Whilst in many instances the workplace and certain strands of job are or have become displaced by new smart technologies. As quoted in the exhibition press release, estimates of upheaval range from Oxford’s much cited 47% of the US population, to the McKinsey Global Institute’s high-water mark estimation of 30% and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s baseline 8%. Whomever is closest, the fact remains, AI will automate many jobs before creating new strands of jobs or asking nations to consider universal wage alternatives.
All this to say, as a group show The Terminal tries to resemble the collaged aesthetics of Pop Art from a socio-cultural perspective projected sixty years down the line. Amalgamating a mixture of Post-Internet aesthetics, a succession of disharmonious transitions and blended environments parallel the tensioned anxieties and occasional hopes presented by each individual artist. Stretched into three- and four- dimensions the collage is no longer comprehensible as an isolated frame that speaks between four borders and quadrants, but now requires repeat elongated viewings to pick up on rhythmic notes speaking across a circular route.
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3D
“We must also praise without reservation the intention to extract from life, and to replunge into life, a new category of forms. That these forms will appear arbitrary to those who measure life with the yardsticks of kitchen sinks and espresso bars is only to be expected. Any attempt to rejuvenate the impact of new forms on our daily experiences is bound to be a struggle on the double front of conventional “realism” and equally conventional “modernism.”” — Rouve, P. (1956) ‘This Is Tomorrow.’ Art Review.
Next to turn our attention to the constructive processes that lie beneath The Terminal we will again reflect on 1956, this time focusing on the exhibition This Is Tomorrow over and above Hamilton’s hallmark image that has come to define it. Impressed by the think-tank mentality he witnessed upon his first encounter with the Independent Group, architect and art critic Theo Crosby conceived This Is Tomorrow as an expression of modern living and the polymorphic overlaps between disciplines that would revolutionise popular culture and mass communication at the midpoint of the 20th century. Crucially important to the strategy behind the exhibition and potentially a contributing factor to it’s two year production phase, was the division of the thirty-eight participating practitioners into twelve numerically designated groups, each involving a three to four person combination of architect, designer, artist and theorist. Equipped with a modest £50 budget, the collaborative formations were left to their own devices, responding to the show’s overarching thematic.
Expressed in an Art Review article from the period, This Is Tomorrow contained within it a mixture of success and failures, with the latter characterised by a failure to communicate a contemporary model of living and instead “lead[ing] back to Dada and and from there straight into the formalist wilderness.” Added to this principle issue, the reviewer critiques the underlying assumption that a marriage of sculptor and architect does anything to solve the utilitarian and client driven needs of constructure, which may in many cases relegate aesthetics, calling the results “devoid of inner strength” and categorising a “purposeless building [as] a logical nonsense.” We might assume that the damage of these harsh words may have played some role in the Independent Group never meeting after the show. Yet, what the reviewer does concede and prophetically foretell is the importance the show will have in the anulls of art history. Surmising its merit as a raised awareness of “what we must do to-day in order to avoid the repetition of what has happened yesterday,” in particular in the field of architecture, and closing on a note that “an intention is often historically and socially as valid as an achievement,” pointings towards the rippling influence of This Is Tomorrow over it’s in person experience.
Contemporaneously, we are bereft of chance to engage with the exhibits within This Is Tomorrow, relying on scant photographic documentation and the recent re-print of the exhibition catalogue — which mainly comprises experimental diagrams — thus the legacy of the show lives on not in the memory of any specific collaboration’s result but in the convergent talents Crosby’s model of curation encouraged. An ethos can be pinpointed to this moment, one in which individual specialisms dissolve into a collectivised and partially de-authored creativity. Ideas behind exhibitions live much longer than the shows themselves. So with a tentative grasp on the actual details of This Is Tomorrow but better equipped with a misty impression of the dynamics and ethoses that informed it’s collaborative construction, we informed the way in which The Terminal was steered to completion.
By no means an exact transplantation of Crosby’s formula, The Terminal does however treat each scene within its cycle as an installation, the product of artist[s], director and curators (or maybe better phrased producers to keep with the filmic analogy). In this system Isolini played the role of director, a title that consistently spilled out into other professional distinctions: cinematographer, set builder, location scout, special effects artist, etc, whilst we acted as the producers, managing the collaborations and serving as critical reflexive infrastructure. Individually each artist was invited to a string of meetings, consultations on what work or works they would like to feature in the movie and how they wished them to be set and framed. Outside of these tripartite meetings, we met with Isolini independently to discuss the transition and overall circular trajectory of the piece, considering how each scene functioned in succession. In essence the process can be considered ten isolated collaborations, with each of the ten artists only having a partial idea of how their work would be contextualised by what preceded and succeeded it. Not dissimilar to the coming together of This Is Tomorrow’s collaborations, which must have been overseen by a smaller curatorial circle.
Added to our two-dimensional notion of collage, The Terminal’s three-dimensional characteristics can be understood beyond the arrangement of equirectangular pictorial space and considered more along the lines of how participants were arranged in order to tend the production. Importantly, it is worth us noting that the isolation of one artist from another was by no means a political intention to ‘divide and conquer,’ but rather a partially practical means of staggering the production in phases and aesthetically a means to ensure individual styles were incorporated without any homogenised dilution.
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4D
“Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space. Our nearest star — our energy-supplying mother-ship, the Sun — is ninety-two million miles away, and the next nearest star is one hundred thousand times further away. It takes two and one-half years for light to get to us from the next nearest energy supply ship star. This is the kind of space-distance we are flying.” — Buckminster Fuller, F. (1969) ‘Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.’ Lars Müller Publishers.
At primary school I have a vague memory of being taken to the assembly hall and ushered with my class into a large dome. The details of this memory are unclear and it is possibly entirely fabricated, but I believe we were shown the constellations. I surmise that for a time a cottage industry existed of travelling astrology projection, moving from school to school setting up a dome from hexagonal fixings, wooden poles, ball bungees and a taut black fabric suited to become the surface of the universe. Sufficient to fit a class or two of children at a time, we must have entered through a flap and at an edge they would have set up a projector, a convex mirror and some technical equipment to run the film. With a laser pointer they could sit and easily signal to the stars, bringing the planetarium to primary school across the country.
Why bring this up? Well besides the fact that we ended up utilising similar projection principles to show The Terminal at anonymous gallery, the reference brings us to the subject of celestial orbits and how these structures spread through time and space allow us to best conceptualise the four-dimensional architecture of the work in question. An orbit most accurately describes The Terminal, it implies both the cyclical and repetitious linearity of the piece, whilst also suggesting the spherical form of the spaceship travelling along this route. What’s more, the rotational nature of planetary bodies nicely correlates to the manner in which The Terminal is experienced using VR headset or by viewing in a media player that facilitates 360° of control.
Thinking about these parallels mathematically, we can compare the 11:33 runtime to the Earth’s 365 day year so that each second converts to 0.52 days [1/ ( (11x60+33) /365) =0.52669553]. For example, April 8th, the day on which the show opened in New York City, would be Sol 98 into the cycle, falling on the 186th second [(693/365) x98=186.065753], or at 03:06, just as we transition from a waterfall to a warehouse. However, this analogy jars a little with our frequent analysis that The Terminal represents a singular uniform day experienced with convincing groundhogian similarity, a nightmarish expression of the experience of the fully automated worker. For this we should more accurately imagine an orbit in which one day and one year are equal, so using a twenty-four hour clock as our measure, the moment in question would 06:16 in the morning [( (24x60) / (365/98) =386.630137) /60=6.44383561].
These numbers aren’t important, they’re only a means to express the celestial manner with which we’ve come to conceive of The Terminal, it moves through space and time with a predictable regularity. Like seasons or the passing of the stars, events unfold and predetermined moments around which cultures establish practices, societies and beliefs flourish. Or on a dividual level that The Terminal concerns, the clockwork succession of scenes becomes the backdrop for a human mind no longer able to govern its own movement, tied like a logistical parcel to a scripted route. Only never reaching a destination of delivery.
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End
Through the two-, three- and four-dimensional layering of The Terminal what we have sought to express is the manner in which exhibition format and conceptual underbelly are intimately tied together within this project. The collaged aesthetics, architectures of collaboration, orbital structures feed off one another feed off of one another and make sense or complicate the central thematics placed at the centre of the show. As best as we can tell, The Terminal is the first cyclical 360° film group exhibition, and given the specificity of that term we would wager a bet on that happily. But this isn’t a gimmick pursued to drive attention towards the project as so many ‘firsts’ within digital arts practices can appear to be, it is a genuine result of thinking through the complexities of the subject and finding a form that could best speak to these concerns. Moving forward with The Terminal, we hope to re-exhibit it, modulating the means of display to see how different presentations encourage new interpretations and unexpected connotations. Undoubtedly, with each subsequent showing we will further complexify our definition and hit new articulative stumbling blocks…
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‘The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole’ was directed and produced by Jason Isolini, curated by Off Site Project, and featured: Bob Bicknell-Knight, Ian Bruner, Joshua Citarella, Jessica Evans, James Irwin, Claire Jervert, Kakia Konstantinaki, Angeline Meitzler, Erin Mitchell and Neale Willis. It was first presented at anonymous gallery in NYC from Thursday 8th April - Saturday 1st May 2021.
