Brandon Tay, “Model E Nomad Lexus,” installation view (photo by Jonathan Tan, courtesy of the artist)
Back in the other time, the “before” time — before this strange, long denouement of the entire world had begun — I attended an art writing workshop hosted by Richard Rhodes, then editor of Canadian Art magazine. He was an art world dinosaur. Not a flesh-eating T-Rex but a benevolent vegetarian. It was 2012 or so. The classic pattern, he said, is description, interpretation, evaluation.
I wasn’t sure I could pull off such authorial objectivity. But a suggestion by an artist in the room saved me. “A good art writer,” she offered, “is one who is able to enter the spirit of the art.” Yes! We need not “look upon” a work of art. We can swim inside it. I was so interested in art’s inner potencies, in how various animas affected me subjectively. I learned to be alert to even small transmogrifications, to attune my chameleon cells. I would never be a commanding dinosaur, but maybe, just maybe, I would be a phenomenological lizard.
But my lizard ambitions seem naïve now. I can’t “enter the spirit” very well anymore. The dizzy spin of AI images, infotainment and capitalist novelty leaves me too overstimulated and bleary. I worry that the vehicle through which I look at art (social media) is too corrupt, too defiling. When trying to navigate the quandaries of AI, my mind doesn’t quite feel like my own. I can’t always find my marbles. Instagram is a hose of shit, a friend said to me recently. Yes, I countered, but there’s also humour, intrigue, pathos, beauty. It’s such a glorious and devastating mix of things. I’m spiritually confused but I’m also an addict.
In the early 1900s, German sociologist Georg Simmel coined the phrase “the tragedy of culture” to describe how objective realities dominate subjective ones. In The Metropolis and Mental Life, he wrote about the objective force of his day — the stimuli of the city. Too many lights, too many choices and too much information, he said, cause us to become “blasé,” a brain state that protects us from becoming overwhelmed. When enduring “the rapid telescoping of changing images,” our nerves “tear (us) about so brutally that they exhaust our last reserves of strength and, remaining in the same milieu, do not have time for new reserves to form.”
What would Simmel have said about scrolling?
And how is this for the same milieu? Donald Trump launched new merch — golden sneakers, emblazoned with the letter T. Jeff Koons sent sculptures to the moon. Naomi Klein is Naomi Wolf. There are Cheetos-flavoured condoms now. Morrissey is a fascist. Mickey Mouse escaped Father Disney’s house. Apple cancelled Vultures. Apple put it back. There’s a hat that says BUTTER. There’s a bumper sticker that reads HONK IF YOU DON’T EXIST. Can you re-read this paragraph to the sound of carnival music? How about swells of orchestral violins?
It’s hard to explain and I’m nervous to try, but when the words “Free Palestine,” written in Barbie font, first appeared in my Instagram feed, something in me broke. The chameleon’s eyes move independently of each other. They can see in two directions at once. But I wasn’t ready for that conflation. The war felt so brutally raw. The pink letters were so pop, so on trend. What spirit was I supposed to swim in? Did you know the female chameleon erupts with colour before dying?
Yes, I can turn off my phone. I do, sometimes. But I feel the need to track what’s going on, to peek through the curtains. I’m befuddled and curious. It’s not the neighbours I wonder about, though. It’s Pandora’s box — the one that lives in my back pocket. It’s the artists. The zeitgeists. The monsters. The prophets.
Brandon Tay, “Model D Heikeji,” installation view, 2023 (photo by Jonathan Tan, courtesy of the artist)
Recently, the algorithm conjured for me Brandon Tay, a Singaporean artist who lists doomscrolling as an intentional part of his process. He also uses induced trance states, new media and generative AI. His recent exhibition, at Yeo Workshop in Singapore, was an invitation to consider ways of knowing that are inhuman and occult, and, more importantly, to consider these as having agency. Tay’s 3D printed sculptures, which he calls “models,” are meant to suggest religious artifacts from the future — one where generative AI has already altered what counts as a mind. Some look like ominous black boxes or data receptacles, while others are mutants with spines and pincers. Each is accompanied by its own epistemological “lore” — an origin story. Their viscous plasticity has a glowing interiority.
I keep a wary eye on artists like Tay, who explore what’s called “emergent phenomena” without caution. “Something strange is arriving … let’s just see where it goes,” he said in an interview supporting the exhibition. Tay’s models, wrote Xue, an author on Substack, “contest the anthropocentric belief that all meaning in this world originates from human cognition or natural systems.” Shivers. Tay isn’t a dilettante with Ouija board. He’s an AI priest. A cyber pagan.
Tay’s receptivity rattles my own lack of conviction, but even the spiritual nature of human-made art lives in an unsure part of my thinking. Art is made of material stuff — paint, canvas, clay, wire. Maybe a goat, maybe a tire. Yet the best art feels imbued with something. Imbued with what, I don’t know. But I always thought a good question for prospective art students would be: “Do you believe in ghosts?”
I recently read about minkisi, a word that means “things which do things” and is also the name for 19th century wooden figurines from the Congo Basin. They are still used to house spirits of the dead, keeping them contained until they’re summoned. In European folklore, mirrors were covered when someone died. People believed they could capture a person’s soul. This belief may have extended to early photography. Wassily Kandinsky wrote his odd yet beguiling manuscript, On the Spiritual in Art, in 1946. “A new law form was realized by Cezanne,” it reads. “He made a living thing out of a teacup!”
The creative process itself is also a strange kind of miracle. The artist plays with inert materials, trying to breathe life into them, to ignite their spark, coaxing them from their non-living state into something with a voice. Usually this does not go well. But if the artist is lucky (or blessed), it happens — some backroom psychic deal occurs, some further level of intuition is granted. The artist knows what to do next. The embryonic artling starts to squawk. The artist knows to be humble in its presence, for it can disappear as fast as it came. It swells and it withdraws, a brief otherworldly wind.
I can understand the appeal. Working with bots can bring the “it” closer. When the American photographer Cindy Sherman was asked by an Instagram follower why she experiments with AI, she replied “It helps me think more supernaturally.” I was grateful to hear this acknowledged by someone so influential and important.
One of the reasons I can’t pin AI into categories of black or white — even though its widely regarded as cheating, thieving, anti-human — is the same reason all spiritual stuff is suspended in my thinking. I don’t know what “it” is. I inevitably experience a reason/instinct schism. AI feels wrong. When engaging with it, my soul, whatever that is, feels tainted. But I don’t know if there is really a ghost in the machine or if that is just a phrase we use when there is a technological development we don’t fully comprehend. There are leftist scholars who say that there is no AI in the way it has been fear-mongered to the public. Rather, AI is just another example of unethical capitalist resource extraction — the resource being our data.
But, then, what exactly is “emergent phenomena?” These two words describe new behaviours within the neural networks of machine learning. But what or who is doing the behaving? Do demons exist? Is AI sentient? In the art world, we like to throw around spiritual terms. We talk about ritual objects and manifestations. But we never really name the thing. We live in the liminal space between denial and belief. Maybe we are too naïve, or too ambivalent. In the modern world, the Western one anyway, the connection between knowledge and the sacred has been lost. I read recently that “enshittification” was a word of the year in 2023. This feels apt, doesn’t it? When Meta spies on our psyches and uses our brains as a place to dump crap advertisements, it feels so awful and exhausting. Maybe this is the inevitable state that follows the word of the 20th Century: desacralization.
Over and over again, art has been called a surrogate religion. And over and over again, that idea has been maligned. In 2004, the American art critic James Elkins wrote a book titled The Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, acknowledging art’s innate spirituality, and at the same time, the art world’s distaste for religion. Orthodoxy, he said, will always be resisted by the avant-garde.
But the way I look at art was formed by galleries. Hours were spent in those immaculate temples, where things transcend their thingness, where objects, whether recent or history-steeped, are given space to breathe. Galleries are places of hushed focus, a sacred state. Inside them, the stimuli of the city fades. Galleries are set apart, parallel to the world. No wonder I can’t keep up anymore, with the volume and pace of Instagram.
When I’m not feeling Insta-malaise though, there’s an AI account I sometimes like to show my kids. Horses made of lace. Beds, chairs, entire rooms made of cheese. Ice cream cones made of faux fur. Fields of fried eggs. This new world dazzles, is filled with delights. Everything is childlike; everything’s on speed. How disappointed I was to find that @jooo.ann is not an artist’s account but a firm that customizes AI brand concepts and “imaginary campaigns” for wealthy clients and major brands — Gucci, Aspire Drinks. Five years ago, the people building AI did so with appropriate terror. Now, AI is in the hands of marketers. Will they sell us back our imaginations?
Blasé is a grey vagueness. Says Simmel, poetically, “it hollows out the core of things.” This is how I feel when there is too much dazzle. But there is a manic swing to life in the now. I get blasé. Then I get ecstatic and hyper. Jean Baudrillard, the guru of French Postmodernism, was right when he described the “ecstasy of communication” as being too close to instantaneous images and information in a too-transparent world. In this situation, he said, the individual becomes a screen, an absorptive surface. The individual is lost to the hyperreal.
Real art and beauty are more urgently needed in the dark night of the soul. And thus my awareness expands, my inner satellites are searching. When not blasé, I glean so much from the art I get to see on social media. There are moments when I am so moved, I nearly decide the extra brain clutter is worth it. Someone posted a watercolour by Otto Dix entitled War Wounded. Someone posted an old pharmacology diagram entitled The Appearance of Blood Vessels in the Ears of a White Rabbit. Sadness flowed to me from both, like a liqueur, like a tonic.
Even walking around Yellowknife, where I live, symbols and omens throw themselves into my line of vision. Someone’s old Halloween skeleton lurches. The ravens laugh. Sunlight strikes snow and sets off a blinding transfiguration. There is a piercing joy, then its soft waning. It’s hard to tell if looking at art helps me see the world, or vice versa. I bought the bumper sticker. Honk! Turns out I don’t exist. I’m trapped in a mirror. I’m a lizard demon.
The algorithm poisons and then resuscitates me. It shows me artists blowing dust from Jungian symbols, shining them up with scraps of flannel and the dew of their breath. It gives me AI aliens who sidle into my brain, illuminating subconscious visions: dark angels with shopping carts, gardens of silicone carnations. And where would I be without the God-haunted rednecks setting things on fire, racing burning tractor tires across fields of dirt? The algorithm leads me to ghost trackers, storm chasers, breakdancers, birdwatchers, star gazers, UFO spotters, lepidopterists. It connects me with my tribes — all the artists running around with cupped hands and Tupperware bowls, trying to save all the wasted light. I’m drowning in beauty. There are one million vigils to attend. See my hyperactivity, my ecstatic tears, my weathervanes spinning in the dizzy winds? ■
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