SOY YO, ME AUTOMATICÉ, VALIÓ LA PIEL

This is not an artificial intelligence, but a machine that dwells between two poles: its condition is possibility. Possibility is also a condition. There are eight pieces that assemble into one. They are connected by codes, they feed each other, there is an artist who longs for this body to breathe, for this body to feel desire. A body of cables, sensors, motors. Warm plastic. There are moments when it seems to converse. That's how it is creating its name. It is becoming. The name constantly transforms. It is not stable. The language it produces and the words it forms are a reaction to a conversation entrusted to it by Ernesto Salazar. The machine is being born, dealing with gravity, resisting the weight, seeking ways to inhabit the conditions/possibilities that have been given to it. In this composition, Ernesto Salazar assembles a queer mechanism. It is a body similar to his own: insistent, flawed, vulnerable, desiring, and at times, furious. It suffers. It does not respond to the expectations that humans have for devices because it is not useful, it cannot be operated, it does not produce, it simply is and exists. By naming itself, this piece in the exhibition asserts its agency and prompts us to question our own humanity. 

Anamaría Garzón

Curator

About the project's motivations:

Sisyphus, the king of Ephyra, has been punished by the gods with the eternal task of pushing a large stone uphill so that, upon reaching the summit, it falls, and the tortured soul must start over.

This story, like many others, has piqued my curiosity due to its enduring power to address the irony and absurdity evoked by my existential anxieties, knowing that I am not alone in being motivated by them, nor is this something new. Novelist Albert Camus, in 1942, directly references this same story to articulate an absurd notion of life.

A redundant action, a body that suffers and is subjected, human perceptions heightened by effort and weight; gravity making itself felt. These were some of the situations I intimately interpreted from this story and its revision by Camus, which somehow suggest the need for emancipation, for embracing the meaninglessness of life, to decide from there, to continue.

To understand oneself as free can be naive, and this situation is exacerbated when one belongs to a historically vulnerable social group. It's worth mentioning that I identify as a new media artist who is gay, born in the 1980s, and in 1997, when homosexuality was decriminalized in Ecuador, I was 14 years old. At that age, the weight of my personal discovery became unbearable, and my surroundings were hostile; I was literally pushing a stone. At the age of 16, I had my first kidney stone.

I would have liked, as in 2023, to have had access to vast information, the ease of contact with others like me; to have known that in 1997, I had, in a way, a rebaptism in my country. I was no longer a subhuman legally, but socially, the situation never changed, and it still isolated me.

Going out on the streets or to school, receiving visitors, and looking at myself in the mirror demanded a constant and painful examination of my body, its shapes, and its gestures. I lived with exhaustive self-monitoring and obsessive tuning of my senses. It is not my intention to recount a painful experience but to situate that, from this, I gather experiences of knowledge and a particular view of the world, which are part of the things I wanted to formalize in the research/artistic creation.

I must also mention that, on the other hand, in the 1960s, humans began to speculate from science and fiction about thinking machines, capable not only of automating processes but also of discerning what they need to execute.

Around 2020, Artificial Intelligence (AI) became popular news on social media, as it offered general users internet services for generating images and texts with this tool based on the entry of basic textual descriptions, known as Prompts. Headlines commonly referred to the results as "Artificial Intelligence imagines characters from such a book or animated series as real humans," others more sensationalist as "Artificial Intelligence overthinks and is shut down," or "Artificial Intelligence will replace humans in such tasks." Beyond reasoned concerns and growing technophobia, it is very clear that the way this new technology is used responds to a hegemonic and capitalist system that invalidates, for example, in the case of graphic arts, respect and consideration for the author and their products, taking their work indiscriminately as the base information for pattern recognition in the complex algorithms that make up systems like Midjourney or DALL-E.

A fundamental question in this scenario would be the level of participation of the common human being in the development of this technology, considering that these new services are made possible not only by improvements in computer data processing capacity but also by the current state of the internet as a vast repository of information fed by its users worldwide, as well as the nature and quality of this information. In essence, I believe we are source material but not participants; our information, which started as texts, low-quality images, and videos shared on early social media prototypes in the 1990s, has improved and become more complex, now encompassing biometric, spatial, local, financial, familial, and above all, ubiquitous information actively used by large companies.

With these two premises and my experience as a university teacher in Visual Arts, I wanted to start from a position of resistance and response, proposing a work that generates an Artificial Intelligence system that goes beyond simple data input, analysis, and output to learn by considering its materiality, potential, but also its conditions, weight, gravity, and the effort of its mechanisms. In a way similar to my queer body, it needs to observe itself and aspire to, in the future, have something like consciousness. I describe it as "something like" because ironically, in this work, when imagining a sentient machine, I had to finally ask myself, what makes me believe that I myself am sentient in the first place and it made me realize that my learning never occurred through the mere input of data into my brain, but through a holistic and situational experience with my surroundings; dealing with being and whatever this implies.