Sub-Rural, #57 Nathaniel Stern and Sasha Stiles

Nathaniel Stern and Sasha Stiles’ “Generation to Generation, Conversing with Kindred Technologies” exhibition in the Kenilworth Gallery at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee  outlines a project that technically, philosophically, and socially describes our place on the obscure timeline of progressive interdisciplinary technologies. It’s a subject that’s profoundly affecting art and design research and practice, as well as the increased attention of markets and the public at large.

While we’ve been waiting to decide about AI’s potential, its frequently compared to the cultural consequences of the printing press, internal combustion engine, high rise architecture, rural electrification, photography, film, and personal computers. Serious artists and just about anyone in the creative industries are racing to initiate opportunities to engage artificial intelligence and computational aesthetics. “Generation to Generation” presents an illumined path to materialize the nearly inscrutable generative media for an aesthetic, linguistic, and ideological playbook.

“The E-Wasteland” gateway text/image is no less than a distressed composition of still-breathing “cyber punk” fragments. Whitewashed laptop Sturm und Drang memory towers pile on a Dieter Roth-influenced and shattered Louise Nevelson ruin with just a touch of mechanical gridlock. The most unique variances for this initial work are the fragments of prose that emerge from monitor embers and bits of crypto-font just underfoot. “E-Wasteland” confirms how crafty old technologies and abandoned architecture can predict future dystopias.

The dis-arrangement of scrapped Apple products form a crescent rampart and is reflective of a show theme tension between creative definition and repurposed abstraction and between the evolution of virtual logic and redemptive design. An anti-rhythmic pattern of language and undercover semiosis slumbers in the ashes.

Throughout the exhibition there is a grid of conceptual furniture and informal hybrid graphics spun out on gallery architecture, and it encourages viewer interactivity, sealing all concepts in the present and with “presence.” Each of six large-scale installations reflect the idea that there is continuity between separate stages of advanced knowledge. It thrives between methods of capturing or originating content, starting with generative vs analogue –  generative being how we learn from Large Language models (LLMs) driving a new era and new identification of creativity and connectivity. It’s a master tactic in the elimination of pesky spacetime boundaries. With the exhibition publication we find out how traditional learning models organize data “in tables or fixed schemas or curated image and audio datasets. Examples include predictive models that analyze tabular data or classic computer vision.”

Stern and Stiles perform data interrogation and language surveillance to heat up the fluid part of an uncanny vision and authorship when interfaced with AI. Theory and design expertise advances their logistically dense aesthetic as it overlaps with structural proficiency and a subtle perfume of foreignness.

“Weighing (Mother Computers)” is a large installation, comprised of numerous individual metal type fonts, forged from recovered waste and embedded in copper slag. 42 AI letters forming a feral 3D poem garden is cast in rare earth materials and landscaped via literal science fiction.

Speculative technologies with “futured” memories and provisional goals lean into an ironic, even Surreal archive of geological and archeological fusion. A petrified neo-reliquary directs content to flash points of festered subaltern relics. They not only exhume AIs materiality but its topography, and perhaps its colonizing authority. The distribution of letters form the title “Poem” and then “Mother Computer.”

The substance of “Weighing” calls attention to the ecological concerns of mining materials for the industry and the costs of maintaining advanced technologies. The fact that the fonts and their staged presentation assume an archeological configuration alerts one to the drama of sequencing, the adjudication of progress, and a not so subtle critique of aesthetics.

Stern and Stiles are right to aggressively push the data in terms of materiality. But place would be another critical subject to explore in order to appraise any project destined to devolve site-less circuit board vision. Which means ditch anything confused for trans-cultural or multi-figurative, and cite places and histories with exceptional identifying models and properties.

Beyond the confiscation of language and visual data mechanization may vex a way forward for art in a way that mimetic obsessions once did pre-Clement Greenberg. Much creative work with AI relies heavily on illustration and illusions, with links to classicism and Gothic design. At Kenilworth Gallery, however, there is a rigorous technological and phenomenological conversation. AI driven art & technology now co-define contemporaneity with an anxious linguistic and optic burden and ideas thrive in triangulation, paradox and debate.

In “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Thomas Kuhn wrote that paradigmatic shifts occur from the bottom up, once existing models of the real no longer circumscribe the logical and experiential. AI is on the doorstep of a paradigmatic shift with or without Kuhn’s stipulation. Next move, “The Uncertainty Principle.”

 

For the past six months Sasha Stiles has exhibited a “A Living Poem” at MoMA, Floor 1, Garden Lobby on the Hyundai Card Digital Wall –  through March 3.

 Unless otherwise noted photography by Gwen Knutson and Greta Craener-Meihsner