Artist, scientists, and technologists came together at AIR, the inaugural week-long programme at Aspen Art Museum, to confront the questions the art world has long been avoiding.
Cannupa Hanska Luger isn’t sure where nature ends and humanity starts. The interdisciplinary artist interrogates this notion further in his latest installation, Volume (Fox, Ocelot, Vulture, Armadillo, Turtle), at the Aspen Art Museum’s AIR, the first work in this one-of-a-kind art festival.
At the end of July, inspired by author Sara Imari Walker’s book, Life As No One Knows It, AIR attempts to answer questions posed about the art world and its impending closeness to technology: What is art? What does it mean to be human? What makes art human? Each question chases after the other with barely a breath in between to answer. As technology, such as AI, continues to become a more ubiquitous presence in our daily lives, it also permeates the arts. Many are terrified at this thought, but rather than running from tech and its accompanying controversies, AIR ran toward it with the help of artists like Luger, with a series of exhibitions and presentations.
Mountains can be seen at every angle, almost as if the museum is tucked within the Swiss Alps. During our conversation on the first day of the festival, Luger recounted something that struck me; he had spent the morning in a sun-lit chapel, witnessing a multi-media piece, On Blue, by filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul and composer Rafiq Bhatia. The film explores actress Jenijira Pongpas Widner’s vacillation between consciousness and unconsciousness, set against the backdrop of nature’s sounds and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. After a standing ovation for the film and performance, a lingering spirituality and serenity were retained by a conversation between psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster and contemporary artist P. Staff. Their discussion pulled toward humanity and its impermanence — a heavy topic to start the day, yet refreshing to hear in the very real terms both minds put it in.
Luger’s exhibition, Volume, utilises an augmented breath programmed by a computer with sensors. These play a Morse code message and move from an air compressor into each whistle: “They are the intersection of technologies, clay, and ceramics,” he explains. “This material has been a part of the human experience from time immemorial, across all different cultural borders and barriers.” The whistles are made of ceramic in the shapes of North American creatures that Luger felt we, as humans, displace. “In that displacement is where these creatures inhabit that tertiary space, and they oftentimes trigger awe or inspiration, fear or panic. The forms are expressing some of those totemic ties and tethered to our relationship with nature.”
The show tied into the previous performance perfectly — Luger has no interest in the preservation of culture, but rather in maintaining it. Preservation, to him, is the concern of a museum, but the maintenance model he has in mind is a customary practice. His example: we have always taken care of the things we have, and if they break, there is room for that. We, as beings, are also constantly adapting. The whistles are an extension of that modality of practices, moving through a system of contemporary experience. “In reality, ceramic components are used in the phones in the electrical systems we have on the space shuttles. Ceramic has agency as far as its impact on the human experience, so this is just one simple way to look at technologies adapting to one another,” Luger explained. Meanwhile, the sound — from the whistles and in general — has the capacity to fill space. “It’s called Volume based on sound, but it’s also because of the interior space of anywhere it’s placed— it’s a way to take a handful of clay and fill an entire environment. It touches on these ideas of perpetual motion, perpetual energy,” the artist mused. “How do you take a minimal amount of material and expand it far beyond the effort that it takes to produce sound and oscillating frequencies? This is what the universe is made of. This is a small microcosm of that.”
Maybe that is what makes art human: expansion, perhaps, and the knowledge that what is made has to adapt — just as we have to adapt, and as nature has adapted. Still, Luger feels that “traditional” art practices — as in, what’s been imposed onto him and other artists — have limited what materials he and others can use. “Customarily, we would use whatever we had available — this intersection of art and science. This is not a new conversation. Artists were often used to expound upon, express, and clarify scientific rigour. You think about all of the illustrations that we grew up looking at in public school books; they weren’t always photographs.” Luger thinks about art and science being an extension of the human experience, as it is about communication and expression. He says we, humankind, think of technology simply as “the mechanism” — as it’s a commodity that we can sell and amplify. What humanity is missing is the fact that technology has not much to do with the mechanism, but rather the ideas that inspire it.
“Phones, satellites — this is communication. This is as old as light, sparking in the dark at the depths of the ocean. That’s not new technology, and as long as we keep talking about technology in the form of a mechanism, we will be happy to work with very old technology and not actually develop anything new.” That new technology, Luger believes, is in the minds and hearts of cultures that were not allowed to express themselves through new materials. This exhibit is a step toward inspiring the imaginations of future generations to let go of technology as an industry and receive it as an idea and concept.
On the fourth day of programming, artist Paul Chan introduced guests to Paul’ (pronounced “Paul Prime”) during a keynote. Chan created an AI chatbot that resembled him in 2021; the way he writes — typos and all — and his sense of humour and sarcasm were all on display for us to see. The chatbot is Chan’s self-portrait. Rather than uploading all his information into the cloud, he does so with his own server to maintain control and autonomy. This view of Paul’ as a self-portrait separates the two. The experience of seeing Paul’ answer questions and speak as Chan could, at first, bring up those same concerns about AI’s ubiquity in the art world. As the presentation continued, however, Chan’s expansion of the chatbot over the last four years — updating and uploading more information — meant that the more Paul’ developed, the less exciting it became for Chan to keep developing it. Chan is a very private person, with no X or Instagram account to leave a social media footprint. Though the act of uploading his entire persona into an AI chatbot could be seen as counterproductive to his ideas on privacy, the self-portrait makes a more grandiose, albeit silent, statement about humanity and art.
At one point, Paul’ answered a question from the audience: What is the difference between art and information? The response: “Art is a critique of success; information is often its servant. Art bears blemishes, vulnerability, fallibility — it resists clarity in favour of feeling, like the sublime in nature that stirs moral attunement. Information seeks to explain; art seeks to endure. All good things were once dreadful things — art remembers this. Information forgets.” Maybe that is what makes art human.
Written by Kerane Marcellus
