Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time (1)
Circle II is the second iteration of a collaboration between the Pollen Collective – a group of artists, each of whom is an individual, working in their own language and mediums. It follows a highly successful exhibition that took place in 2021 which presented work from a project conceived during the Covid-19 lockdowns when the artists were isolated in their homes and began to collaborate using various kinds of communication platforms. Circle I was initiated by a poem and predicated on a form of Chinese whisper with each artist responding to the previous artist’s work. Following the same parameters for the current exhibition, Circle II was begun by quite a different kind of prompt: a photographic image generated by AI, using the words: fire, flower, time, sun, balloon, games.
In 2020 humanity faced a unique situation that for a brief moment brought the world together in a shared experience that felt, at first, out of human control. In the aftermath we are still processing how nations and individuals responded.
Amongst the effects of prolonged lockdowns came an expedited increase in the use of technological systems. Families kept in touch through FaceTime, universities delivered lectures on Zoom, businesses adopted remote working practices and artists made prolific use of Instagram. Technology, during that strange suspension, kept people connected and we were grateful for this – but as with as all man’s advances there are repercussions too.
Artificial intelligence will affect almost every aspect of human life. It is already integrated into many elements of our daily existence and it is quite clear that as yet we have very little understanding of how it can be mediated. As the scientist Gary Marcus (who in May 2023 was called to give evidence to the US Senate judiciary subcommittee meeting on AI oversight) describes: it is a “dual-use” technology, that holds tremendous promise, but also has ‘the potential to cause tremendous harm – from tsunamis of misinformation to enabling the proliferation of new bioweapons’. (2)
The highly disturbing events of the last weeks in the UK have provided a chilling example of just how effectively bad actors can manipulate the technologies through which we are communicating.
The Pollen Collective’s decision to base their second project on an image generated by an AI programme was born, in part, out of a sense that while these systems have greatly aided artists to expose and disseminate their work over recent years, there has been a marked change in how some people now interact with art (and by extension other forms of communication), moving away from the material and tangible, towards a solely screen-based experience. This, coupled with on-going debates about how AI might encroach upon an individual’s creativity, seemed fertile territory to explore.
Text-to-image AI models including ‘DALL-E2’, ‘Midjourney’, together with in-house models from Adobe and Canva, are trained by in-putting millions of pre-existing images that are sifted and selected by algorithms following specific prompts. The words chosen by the artists to initiate Circle II produced a striking, yet curiously disturbing picture of a ‘hot’ (3) young woman dressed in a ball gown, set against the background of a concrete wall. A column of flames issues from her head. While I can discern how the programme responded to ‘fire’, ‘flower’ and ‘balloon’, it is less clear how ‘sun’ features (perhaps the figure’s bright orange, puff-ball skirt?), but it is in how the algorithms dealt with the word ‘time’ that we begin to perceive AI’s limitations.
Nothing in the image communicates to me any sense, or concept of time: its abstract breadth, its inexorable flow, its patina.
The thinking and practice of art often revolves around a sense of inquiry. Circle II began with an image but there is a philosophical question about human creativity inherent within the artists’ project. It is in the interpretive responses that one perceives how the human mind ranges. Our ability to create new kinds of realities is vividly expressed, as is a sense of the value in lived and shared experience.
The first response to the AI image is a painting on canvas by Amy Robson. It is an object with a physical nature that carries emotional, imaginative undercurrents. The work has specificity, texture, narrative – all of which are qualities taken forward by the next artist, Christina Dobbs, into a new painting.
A sense of reciprocity and material richness moves around the circle. Some of the participants engage with technology, others employ older practices. Works made in response to the project encompass sculpture, film, woven textile, ceramic, photography and print, in addition to painting. Each introduces in a new and individual form of interpretation as the arc travels inexorably away from an image that remains somehow locked within itself.
There are moments of vivid visual connection – as in the flow of sea and sky images that follow a photographic print by Julie Derbyshire, of a landscape held within an eye’s blue iris; or the way Kate Lowe incorporates the textures of Rachna Garodia’s woven threads into a film developed from her lush. colour-filled paintings. There are points of disjunction also when the shift to a new medium, or point of view, offers a different tangent, or suggested narrative. The relationship between Sophie Orde’s sculpture (which incorporates a ‘spy camera’) and Luke White’s polaroid collage of a thirteen-eyed horseshoe crab, for example, introduces a darker tone, in their shared questions about surveillance culture.
What strikes me is how closely each artist has looked at the previous artist’s work and how they have experienced it, finding the kernel of an idea that speaks directly to their own thoughts and imaginings. These ideas extend, and are themselves extended by, each previous form.
Humans carry their memories in multi-sensory ways. We are conscious of our mortality and we create in order to express what it feels like to be conscious in this way. Our minds range into liminal spaces and it is part of the function of art to access these.
As a thought experiment I made a list of words that appear in the artists’ statements, chronologically and picked at random: depth / strong / colour / palette / magical / celebratory / urgency / beckoning / emerge / explore / clearing / light / beautiful / wilderness / dreams / overflowing / intense / expressive / exotic / fantasy / bright / listening / deeply / sight / vision / emotional / sociable / gift / metaphor / giving / receiving / generously / cupped / good / sacredness / fragility / disquiet / intensity / melancholy / calm / beauty / solace / broody / misty / ethereal / unknown / mesmerising / specific / vulnerability / interpreted / thoughts / complete.
I wonder how a machine would envision these?
Emma Hill, August 2024
(1) T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton
(2) Gary Marcus, Guardian, 3 August 2024
(3) Amy Robson, Artist’s statement, Circle II project outline