Project Arts Centre
15 December 2023 – 10 February 2024
“God created man in his own image…” – Genesis 1:27
In machine-learning, a ‘Ground Truth’ is the original image from which an artificially intelligent system trains itself – it is a given reality one seeks to model. On one wall of the Project Arts Centre gallery space, we see projected Untitled (After Sensory Primer), the computer-generated viscera of a human anatomy, beginning with the muscular cycles of a foot taking a step. The sounds of synths, of drones, of a child babbling, resonate across the room. Through a pale glow we see the X-rayed bones, the sinews, the cells, all branching off into their own diagrammatic fractals, and the axes of their mechanical motion. There is a clinical religiosity to their mandala-like arrangement as they glow in pulsing primaries of red, blue, and gold before breaking down into their constituent structures, fading cyclically in and out. A simulation of a body being skinned alive via the computer’s generative gaze, it should register as violent, but is serene.
On the eroticism in harm, Roland Barthes wrote of “the exposure of the flayed… the particular sensibility of the amorous subject, which renders [them] vulnerable, defenceless to the slightest injuries,” – that is, the raw nerve of experience, an open wound like an unblinking eye upon the world. On digital beauty, Byung-Chul Han writes: “the pure inside without any exteriority is the mode in which it appears. It turns even nature into a window of itself… an absolute subjectivity under which the human being encounters only itself” – mitigating the violence of perception, mediating what he otherwise describes as “seeing as injury.”
It is this exposure that characterises the neurodivergent experience, as manifest in ‘over’ or ‘under’ sensitivities – even sensibilities. The accompanying literature reveals Cooper’s interest in ‘stimming’ – the repetitive non-verbal behaviours and sounds that arise in the autistic body, so as to cope or non-verbally communicate. It is in communication, or perceived lack thereof, that neurodivergence is often identified. As an ‘autist’ myself – diagnosed late into my twenties – I speculate on the nature of bodies as individuated, biomechanical languages in their own right. Self-enveloped, if perforated systems of countless chemical and nervous semiotics. The term ‘autism’ derives from the Greek word ‘autos’ meaning ‘self’. Is to be autistic, then, to be acutely oneself? From a young age, I have considered myself a body that is trying to become human.
The image before me could seem anything but human, in its sheer technical proximity to the human – the most human element is perhaps revealed only in a technical error. I have misjudged in thinking the projection is the sole component of the show, for the gallery’s opposite wall has been blank for 20 minutes. Two technicians enter, before, miraculously, the second piece begins to work again by itself. They laugh, and walk away – I smile, somehow relieved to witness a mistake. We see pink lasers live-animating (described in the literature as ‘performing’) childlike drawings of a spider, then a snake, then a jellyfish – their otherwise naive forms uncannily disrupted by the realism of their motion.
The animated figures are the untitled result of collaboration with Cooper’s four-year-old daughter. The rudimentary forms of the child’s first drawings invoke former evolutionary possibilities, whose remnants, to one degree or another, selectively litter the deeper sediments of our DNA. These interactions between past and present are reflected in the show’s makers. In ‘Ground Truth’, beyond the conceptual exploration of contemporary technologies, we are seeing a dialogue of times – as embodied in two generations of Cooper – encoding and generating both one another, and the third space of the gallery, in an emergent, tertiary reproduction. Two ways of speaking a third way into existence.
Standing between the two projections, between Mother and Child, I ask myself: Is not all ‘intelligence’ artificial? Does not all intelligence build upon its input? Do we not construct one another in mutual simulation? Did not the physical universe continue to intervene upon itself, communicate to itself, eventually conceive of itself through consciousness? By this logic, is Artificial Intelligence not the most human thing one could think of? Or are us humans really who we think we are?
Day Magee is a performance-centred multimedia artist based in Dublin.
@daymagee
