Perhaps nothing is more terrifying in the contemporary creative’s conscience than making art about artificial intelligence (AI). We have always asked questions about technological power and limits. When the parameter of its discussion runs just as deep as it does wide, where can we find the nuances between machine art and human art? Where in this landscape do we find the space to discuss something more discursive?
Perhaps not within the inherent nuance, but within the landscape itself: the foundation, the material. Artspace’s latest exhibit, Amongst the clouds (digital materialities in the 21st century), depicts exactly this — a refreshing conversation about the material of the digital artificial substance, rather than the so-called intelligence.
Pioneering six Australian and international artists (Liu Chuang, Nina Davies, Archana Hande, Lawrence Lek, Sophie Penkethman-Young, and Liam Young), Amongst the clouds reminds us that the digital cannot exist without physical matter itself. It’s a double entendre of a kind: the digital reliance on device to exist, and the artists reliance on material to create. Both, in a sense, aim to produce pleasurable (or otherwise) matter via the aid of the visual language and semiotics. This is the idea of the cloud as a frictionless, matter-less place, disassembled in the space of the exhibit, and the inherent etymology of submitting for consideration.
Curated by Katie Dyer and Sarah Rose, the physical space of Amongst the clouds is divided by thick blue-hued butchers curtains, almost too intentional to be overlooked. Something about the image of a butcher shop opened by the plasticity of a fringed curtain made this exhibit feel more transactional, or meat-fed. A doorway that is the exact opposite of its definition, as it is at once open and closed via the slits in the plastic: perhaps another nod to the constant ‘on’ mode of digitalism, something we are still accessing even if we are not actively on our phones. The exhibit itself, cleverly laid-out, opens onto the sculptural work of Archana Hande, a brutalist-esque cityscape structure created from textile punch cards, backlit by artificial light to shadow a liminal kind of architecture around the space, where one can hear the subtle digital overwhelm of televisions in the next space. Here, there is a definitive air of decayed structure, a dismissal of traditionalism for digital efficiency. As one moves from Hande’s work into the next space, this idea becomes materialised : a room of multiple screens, televisions, iphones, ring-lights, video game consoles and overlapping sounds against the backdrop of the impersonal concrete, brick and vintage scaffolding of the room itself.
The television embedded into the concrete space is a visual that feels preternatural, and yet it is hardly dystopian. We watch advertisements be pasted to the sides of office complexes and bus stops, and we consider this just ubiquitous. It is controlled chaos of angular arrangements and competing audio; the smooth surface of the concrete against the certainty of the televisual shape makes visual sense, as if to say the ground beneath us is just as certain as the screen in front of us. In this space, one can expect to find a videogame about sono-futurism, robots constructed to help ease automated machines into obsolete deaths, and deal with the grief of such a process. Or, perhaps an entire short film created with the aid of AI and generated images to create a futuristic cityscape where cities have vacated human governments for an AI power in a “smart city”. A Frankenstienian still-life of televisions tells the story of how we have created, bred, trained, and domesticated dogs both for personal companionship and military or governmental purposes —just like what we have done with AI. Proto-computing of a fake TikTok dance trend in which the physical, flesh body mutates to perform only to the screen, only to the algorithm. Techno-faith, pleasure and overwhelm wrapped up into one, and pleasure from the overwhelm akin to Freud’s death-drive. The idea is that the overwhelm feels okay, as long as we don’t have to think about it. Or make a decision about it. Or have any kind of concrete thought. This is to say that we do such a thing every day too. AI is Google maps. AI is picking our playlists based on moods we are told we should have by an algorithm. AI picks what takeout we get tonight. Who we fuck. When the next bus is coming. Our heart rate. What we buy with our hard-earned money. Whether or not you should go to this exhibit….
Amongst the clouds looks with the whole body, and the extension of the body too, the (new) prosthetic of our own devices, the phone, the smartwatch, the wireless earbuds. It is an exhibit about the presence within the present, and one of perfectly timed relevancy in our digitally saturated climate.
Amongst the clouds (digital materialities in the 21st century) will be exhibited at Artspace from the 8th of May to the 20th of July 2025.
For more information about the exhibit and the artists, you can visit their website here.
