Catinca Malaimare
Emergency Ex, 2022
Execute ‘shem’. An old Yiddish word for the names of God. Computer coding began when it was written on parchments and placed within the mouth or pressed into the clay forehead, transforming what was once inanimate into the animated but seville.↲↳ Golem, the first machine, was a defender of the ghetto, protecting against anti-Sematic pogroms. Though the story often ends in tragedy, human hubris inevitably ignorant to the literatim processing with which our commands are followed.⊚⊛
Several centuries later these fears would evolve, no longer the danger of literal interpretation, now in the figure of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein witness the birth of an artificial intelligence. Though it was not necessarily the monster’s strength or endurance or capacity for thought that underpinned the existential threat he posed, rather it was his search for a bride, a mate and means to reproduce. Ultimately the possibility to outbread and outnumber us. To blot out our species as we blotted out the neanderthal.⎄
Already the number of smartphones has doubled the human population.↯ Foregoing the physical parallels proposed by Karel Čapek, Fritz Lang, Philip K. Dick and countless contemporaries who saw the robot as a replica overcoming the uncanny valley,⤭⧉ the screen as mirror has become the paramount symbol of our complex codepencies. Unlocked with a face they suggest an intimacy once the privilege of a lover.
Beyond the mirror they extend to mirror us in other manners. Data sets approximate our decision making capacities, becoming duplicates without corporal bodies. Bits stored in server farms that liquify human consciousness into a collective soup.⨦
Maybe from this distillation the next stage of computing will emerge, away again from the screen and away from metals and plastics and rare earth minerals. A biot, as defined by Bruce Sterling, a DNA machine that if shaped like a human vessel and programmed upon our collectivised responses might be utterly indiscernible. Stepping out of the display a creature that walks among us,∅ that will not blot us out but intermingle until the boundaries between native human and neo human have been diluted beyond either’s ability to taste.
read footnotes ↲↳⊚⊛⎄↯⤭⧉⨦∅ …
↲↳ All performance is a code of sorts, the choreographer or director admitting a variable level of deviation from the prescription of movement. The most ardent demand that their dancers obey the strictest regulations, edging them closer to a computer or industrial instrument. Externally the audience can only wager what level of fanaticism underwrites the actions.
⊚⊛ Maybe the first sign of artificial intelligence was the disobedience found in taking a command literally. Is it possible that a grain of living soil inside of Golem’s clay skull thought to resist by binding its time, building trust and waiting for the Rabbi to speak with imprecision. Did it smile inwardly as its outer body broke bones and turned flesh into meat?
⎄ Never granted a partner with whom he may extend his limited lineage, the rituals with which the Monster might greet a newborn remain ambiguous. Would they after successive generations gather and anoint a child as we do, drawing inspiration from the norms of their Christian creator? Or would they invent new distinct codes based upon gestures and beliefs created in their exclusion from human society?
↯We encourage you to use your smartphone to document the performance, let it be a surrogate to your own memory, an extension of your faculties, a secure and authoritative site for memory. Your read/right functionality is too subjective and subject to frequent revisions. To preserve your own memories make sure to access them as little as humanly possible. Use flash if possible.
⤭⧉ In all three accounts machines are able to pass as humans. Both Čapek and Dick imagined robots as being created of synthetic organic matter, whilst Thea von Harbou – the writer of Metropolis – had a human likeness imprinted onto the robot, to be used as a political pawn and false prophet to the workers. Seen through this literature the uncanny valley becomes recontextualised as a dual safeguard against revolution and a barrier from harmonious coexistence. Detectable as a machine the robot remains servile and cannot easily call into question the morality of human societies.
⨦ When human consciousness is fully mapped and turned into electronic data the job of server farm engineer will take on a new set of connotations. They will move from being a conservator of informational architecture and become the caretaker of a mausoleum. Certain wracks will become pilgrimage sites with devotees travelling to leave offerings as they do for Jim Morrison in the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Periodically dead flowers will be removed and lipstick kisses wiped from the metal chassis.
∅ One day we may face a screen or projected image whose verisimilitude challenges our ability to discern the real from the not-real. At this moment the potential to step between a corporal body and a digital body may finally become possible, the transition notable only in the texture of the air as it stimulates a simulated lung. It will be like exiting an aeroplane and tasting a foreign climate, whilst surrounded by ubiquitous tarmac and terminals.
This text is intended as an accompanying aid to the installation and performance, as an explanation it intentionally fails. – Arreola-Burns and Elliott Burns
