Frederick Thackeray-Vincent opens up about the complexity of his AI-inspired work and the limitations and misunderstandings around contemporary AI.
Frederick Thackeray-Vincent 2021 Everyday Automata 008 Imagines what on earth a sentient computer would want to buy from us?
Your series Everyday automata gives a drone-eye view of a lush non-human landscape teeming with robotic machines, are they forming new temples or existing ones?
The painting is a speculative fictitious landscape and one devoid of a human presence except the few structures left by them. Taking this perspective in the manner of a Bosch or Breughel allows a sort of world building to take place, it’s distant, and maybe there’s a fear held of not getting too close or committed. There’s a great artist who died recently called Lois Wernberger who made sculptures where the space created was not for us but for another era and rhythm entirely, making the viewer a true outsider. Maybe there’s something happening in these works that is similar, that the life after we depart is the focus. Although hopefully picturing such a place is also instructive for someone today and maybe life after we depart is a Utopia.
By placing the works on interlocking panels, they have the ability to mutate, shift and transform, what was your idea behind that…
It was about the challenge and a limitation, my studio at the time was my bedroom so I couldn’t make one huge painting! But I made this into a creative challenge; could I make a seamless landscape out of separate sections? And could I keep on growing the painting bit by bit? There’s also the more technical challenge of collecting different ideas and writing backstories for the scene and allowing them to shift in purpose and meaning as they are painted. These works are actually more designed. The usual abstractions and shifts that are often in my paintings are more restrained in this series. But it’s tempting to allow some of this transcendence in. The way I paint, depictions of rocks, flora, fauna, creatures, tools – they all become very interchangeable, but here we have more of a lush ruin, a vestige of vitality.
For you AI and advanced technology has a utopian aspect, you see it as entirely positive development despite the many highly publicised fears around it…
Some of the works have a ‘no place/no time’ quality to them which is very interesting as that is the definition of Utopia and exactly the sort of legacy projects and places that people like Tacita Dean and other archival artists focus on. Personally, I don’t think artificial intelligence as utopian in its affect, though as you say there’s a strong utopian thread running through the ideals and traditions of those building AI’s codified Start Up mantra. Like the notion of ‘reducing friction’, we hear it all the time: ‘This app makes your life simpler’. Of course we know they’re hiding the work necessary to do this and then selling on that info when they IPO!
Yet you are not critical?
Well, in reality this is a very mixed bag, less friction does not always mean a better life. And our own ability to make creative leaps is already denigrated by our phones and apps. Think about being fed on what a machine thinks you want to see all of the time via a social media feed, does that really help you to make a inspirational leap? Probably not and that’s before mentioning the effects on our attention, latent biases or limited filtering leading to lasting damage in judicial, health and political decision making and the many other mistakes that are happening already as a result of the limitation and misunderstandings around contemporary AI.
But I do believe it is important and one of the most exciting opportunities ever for creating new metaphors, models, stories and artwork. It’s something that is already vastly reshaping our society with the promise of even further improvements to come.
You, of course, have worked in tech start ups for many years…
Yes and that does give you an insight into how the motivations of those advancing this form of technology, have the biggest single impact on their effect on the rest of us. To put it very simply, we live in a consumer society so it’s not a surprise that one of the core aspects of many AI’s is an exchange and one propagated by the needs and goals of a business or some indivisible monolithic force. In some ways I think there’s a residue of underlying consumer edge to many of our technologies or experiences that are ‘improved’ by AI. It would be fascinating to inverse these ideas. Try and imagine, for instance, what on earth a sentient computer would want to buy from us?
Algorithms are already dictating our professional, creative and social worlds, do you?
Algorithms today are still very limited in the environments where they are applied, natural language processors are not able to properly process unknown information or half known environments like the physical world. So quite understandably AI’s are generally not seen as particularly sentient. However, it took no time at all for people to start divulging their innermost thoughts and worries to one of the earliest nlp’s. So it’s very addressable, it very much depends upon how their makers and implementers want them to be seen.
Why are you so fascinated by the implications of AI?
Because if we characterise AI, it makes it easier to consider their impact upon us (it’s like thinking about the daemons from Phillip Pullman’s dark materials trilogy). But I’m fascinated by the questions such leaps of imagination might give us. Learning about how something very alien senses, feels internally, physically, between each other and with unknown factors is the realm of sci-fi but understanding it would certainly help our own ability to empathise with each other, which is a faculty that is – somewhat ironically – being eroded by these very same contemporary AI’s that create information bubbles.
Do you think artists can play an important role in monitoring and adjudicate AI and the future it will bring?
I would say that many researchers and developers imagine AI’s as deficient in something, there’s an assumption that they are missing bits, that they are are amorphous Frankenstein which just needs some (huge) upgrades here and there to become better and parable with us. That’s certainly how the research is mapping out. But the truth is humans are missing parts too, we are often deficient in all sorts of ways, sleep, maturity, time; how we go about bridging those gaps can bring a lot of joy and distress to ourselves and those around us. So would a general purpose advanced AI necessarily do the same thing? Or would they find that approach makes no sense because it could be re-written and tested millions of times in a matter of seconds? How we imagine this for them and how that plays out is hugely engaging to me. And I often consider where that will that leave us? Can this be imagined, made or painted now?
How do you think that technology will benefit artists working today?
I’ve spoken with a lot of artists about what kind of environment or situations are conducive to their creativity and more specifically about what sort of qualities these places had. It started just before Covid and led to the platforms make.garden and cohort.art projects.
There’s something of a surrealist thread running through your work. How do you develop or select the images or your inspiration?
One of the things I've noticed with other painters is, like every one we are besieged with so much information, the more valuable resource is our attention, what you choose to focus on and for painters that can be even more acute, it might be months or even years spent on one particular image.
But this is not the first time that a society has suddenly had such a huge increase in information, I think many of the works and concepts from early modernism were driven by similar factors, the huge scope of the wasteland or Andre’s Malraux idea of a museum without walls spring to mind. But the thing with the subconscious and surrealism is how much further those ‘sciences’ have developed since the Surrealists first came along. Can these preconscious progenitors be surreal or alien starting points for ideas or metaphors to capture the existence of a general purpose AI? That’s not something that I can clarify yet but it’s certainly the link that broaches the two sides of my work.
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