IT STARTED WITH A KISS
It Started with a Kiss looks at the control of information space and the expanding influence of form over content in the human built world, with a focus on machine learning. It looks at A.I. struggling to write code for its own body in the material world.
Sad Boy: A Dark Comedy in Pastels, oil and acrylic on canvas, 1014 x 554 x 20mm, 2024
The sad boy is surrounded by dissolving binary bits, living in a human-built world, separated from nature.
Let Me In, ink, acrylic paint and gouache on cutout cardboard, 610mm h x 1020mm w, 2020 These are the eyes of deep learning bumping up against the frail partition between the digital world and the analogue world. They are testing different eyes to see us with.
Plant, Animal, Mineral, acrylic and ink on cutout cardboard, 800mm h x 1000mm w, 2020
Plant, Animal, Mineral is about artificial intelligence crossing from the virtual world into our world, and indiscriminately viewing the lumps of matter it finds. Plant, animal, mineral – all are just forms to be assembled, disassembled and recombined.
Negative Space,188 x 780 x 360mm, 2023
Negative Space bounces around meaning: referring to the art term, to the state of mind, and to the totalitarian impulse to control and minimize peoples’ lives. The little clay balls are laid in rows before brutalist chunks of authority. But the chunks are hollow, any content has fallen out of the holes ages ago. The little clay balls can plug them, but they’ll still have nothing inside.
IT STARTED WITH A KISS: FOSCA
It Started With a Kiss: Fosca has been supported by CreativeNZ, the Blumhardt Foundation and The Arts Foundation Boosted community. The Fosca objects are a meditation of the deep learning machine; they are Artificial Intelligence struggling to find a form for itself in the world of matter. I've used clay, an ancient technology, to look at 21st century technology.
Red earthenware painted with layers of slip
An earlier iteration of Fosca
 |
Language Machine 2
|
 |
Language Machines 3
|
Remade: Likes
Unmade: clay
 |
| 2D Fosca |
(Diamond Nose) IT STARTED WITH A KISS: a low resolution show about high technology, Waiheke Community Art Gallery ~Te Whare Taonga o Waiheke, 2018
In 2018 I went to a residency at Buinho Creative Hub, Messejana, Portugal where they have an MIT Fablab and creative and technical support for your project. Buinho is run by artist academics Carlos Alcobia and Sara Albino, it is an extraordinary and inspiring experience. The design of the AI stencils were the focus of my residency at Buinho where the designs were vectored, and then later machine cut.
This project is about how our thinking and feeling is mediated through digital platforms, the content being determined by the form of the algorithm. It is an investigation of the expanding influence of form over content in the Human Built world.
We have always been enamoured of technology, from ancient technologies like art and language to the technologies of high science and industry. As AI rises from the dross of human ambition it crosses the liminal space between the virtual and the haptic world. As it swivels its vertebrae-free head around to see the view it can’t differentiate us; pavement, tree, beetle, human, rock. Everything is an object.
I have used pattern as the main investigative tool for this project as pattern recognition is central to machine learning and to human learning, something we have in common.
 |
These are stencil portraits of the shifting, invisible face of AI. They are stencils with the negative space still intact: unreachable, noncommunicable
|
 |
These are hapless, trudging workers (us) from the Back to Work: to the tune of You Are My Sunshine series
|
 |
On the table sit the Techno-Barons who AI will view as just more random shapes, they will not be honoured as their creators. Below them on the floor are their attributes: Failure Balls and Friends.
|
 |
| Success 1 and Success 2 |
Broadsheet Stencils: draw your own news
New Zealand Painting and Printmaking Award Exhibition, layers of finely sanded gesso stained with ink on cardboard, 2017
The Stencils are the size and proportion of traditional New Zealand broadsheets. They are stacked on top of one another, as if fresh off the printer ready for folding and delivery. But this is online news, and these stencils are digital feedback loops with no critical structure. Intellectual discourse has dwindled to scratching on the wall. The Stencils come with pencils.
Broadsheet Stencils 2, hand cut from newsprint, they will tear if you try to use them, 2017
(Not in this show, but belong to this family)
INTERACTIVE WALLS
With the stencils made in the Collective Invention workshops. Here is the interactive part of the show- which ran onto the fourth wall, meandering between the sculptures! I ran a series of stencil workshops with cool communities; the artists of the Waiheke Adult Learning Centre and artists from MÄpura Studios in Auckland, and artists and friends at Morgadinho, Buinho Creative Hub and the children of Jecnicas de Accao E ducativa in Messejana, Portugal. Some of the artists hand-cut their own stencils from their designs, the rest of the designs were transposed into a stencil format (intuitively and by hand rather than machine vectored) and hand-cut by me.
Here are some of my favourites, they are renditions of sculptures in the show, people also started drawing freehand from the ideas in the stencils as well.
Here is Mr. Poverty, 3 bags full, with his attributes: the failure balls  |
|
Mr. Poverty is the handmaiden of trade. He is a minor deity who has risen through the ranks of the natural gods, and the decorative gods, and is now dancing on the tables. He is accompanied by his attributes: the rolling, decaying failure balls, who start taut and puffed up at the beginning of the show, only to wither and shrink by the show’s end. They can then begin their hopeful cycle again with the insertion of a new balloon. Mr. Poverty carries these in the cavity of his torso.
