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five sides, mounted on a ten-foot-wide mirrored base. A variety of viscous and
unpleasant-looking fluids (yellow, reddish-orange, brown), dry materials (sawdust?
flour?), and even insects drizzle or dust their way down the head, whose stoic sublimity is
made gorgeously virtual on the work’s enormous screens. Dead Imagine, through its
large-scale and cubic “Platonic” form, remains both artificial and locked into the body—
refusing a detached “intelligence” as being no intelligence at all.
Artists in the new millennium inherit this critical tradition and inhabit the current
paradigms of AI, which has slid from partial simulations to claims of intelligence. In the
1955 proposal thought to be the first printed usage of the phrase “artificial intelligence,”
computer scientist John McCarthy and his colleagues Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel
Rochester, and Claude Shannon conjectured that “every aspect of learning or any other
feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be
made to simulate it.” This modest theoretical goal has inflated over the past sixty-four
years and is now expressed by Google DeepMind as an ambition to “Solve intelligence.”
Crack the code! But unfortunately, what we hear cracking is not code but small-scale
capitalism, the social contract, and the scaffolding of civility. Taking away the jobs of
taxi and truck drivers, roboticizing direct marketing, hegemonizing entertainment,
privatizing utilities, and depersonalizing health care—are these the “whips” that Wiener
feared we would learn to love?
Artists can’t solve any of this. But they can remind us of the creative potential of
the paths not taken—the forks in the road that were emerging around 1970, before
“information” became capital and “intelligence” equaled data harvesting. Richly
evocative of what can be done with contemporary tools when revisiting earlier
possibilities is French artist Philippe Parreno’s “firefly piece,” so nicknamed to avoid
having to iterate its actual title: With a Rhythmic Instinction to Be Able to Travel Beyond
Existing Forces of Life (2014). Described by the artist as “an automaton,” the sculptural
installation juxtaposes a flickering projection of black-and-white drawings of fireflies
with a band of oscillating green-on-black binary figures. The drawings and binary
figures are animated using algorithms from mathematician John Horton Conway’s 1970
Game of Life, a “cellular automaton.”
Conway set up parameters for any square (“cell”) to be lit (“alive”) or dark
(“dead”) in an infinite, two-dimensional grid. The rules are summarized as follows: A
single cell will quickly die of loneliness. But a cell touching three or more other “live”
cells will also die, “due to crowding.” A cell survives and thrives if it has just two
neighbors . . . and so on. As one cell dies, it may create the conditions for other cells to
survive, yielding patterns that appear to move and grow, shifting across the grid like
evanescent neural impulses or bioluminescent clusters of diatoms. In Stephen Hawking’s
2012 film The Meaning of Life, the narrator describes Conway’s mathematical model as
simulating “how a complex thing like the mind might come about from a basic set of
rules,” revealing the overweening ambitions that characterize contemporary AI: “[T]hese
complex properties emerge from simple laws that contain no concepts like movement or
reproduction,” yet they produce “species,” and cells “can even reproduce, just as life does
in the real world.” 50
Just as life does? Artists know the blandishments of simulation and
representation, the difference between the genius of artifice and the realities of what “life

50 Narration in Stephen Hawking’s The Meaning of Life (Smithson Productions, Discovery Channel, 2012).

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