CARBON : COPY
New Works by Skyler McLean & Noah Hornik
SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC, 2022
A Collection of Mostly Relevant Ramblings
by Noah Hornik
Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and over again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels.
Jorge Luis Borges, from “Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius”
On May 10, 1997, IBM’s supercomputer “Deep Blue” — a glorified refrigerator — defeated chess world champion Garry Kasparov in an unprecedented intellectual triumph of man over machine. A Neo-Luddite fever dream invaded reality.
Born on May 10, 1997, Skyler McLean, for just a day, inhabited an Earth upon which humans could claim intellectual supremacy — one day atop the cognitive food chain.
70 days later I (Noah Hornik) was born.
Our waking lives, every acknowledged cerebral current, has been predicated on the omnipotence of silicone chips and their celestial hive mind. CARBON: COPY is the story of two friends navigating a world where the digital supersedes the physical, but beauty is still to be found in both.
On Cosmic Jazz
AI has the potential to generate pseudo-natural forms unbound by the innate geometries of the covalent bond. When the period table is replaced by a labyrinthian network of “zeroes and ones,” Earthly elements’ generative potential exudes the inadequacy of a Crayola 24 pack. Carbon-based life eternally beats in the terrestrial time signature. Cyberspace’s cosmic jazz — composed in the very absence of time — scoffs at the naïveté of linear “rhythms.”
Akin to Man (or, my best wordplay ever)
The mannequin is akin to man insofar as we can condense and reproduce our likeness on a grand scale. Internet avatars and their meta-avatars reflect the ideology inherent in the production and proliferation of falsified plastic people. The mannequin is avatar embodied…
Anachronistically.
CARBON : COPY
I recently discovered, or at least internalized, that to cc someone on an email meant to “carbon copy.” Perhaps my cognitive disconnect emerged from the vast conceptual disconnect between a physical carbon copy (literally just scratching something through paper), and an email’s cc, which can be infinitely distributed in a matter of (milli)seconds. Detached from carbon — both in its human, and soot-stained paper form — the cc is an infinitely more efficient means of information dissemination; I personally would prefer the logically sound term sc, or silicon copy.
Email semantics aside, the title of the show, “CARBON:COPY” refers to the notion of self-replication: whether it be our brains via artificial intelligence, or our bodies via mannequins.
Terrestrial lifeforms are made of carbon.
We copy them.
Add two and two together.
Skyler McLean and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Light
So benumbed are we nowadays by electric lights that we have become utterly insensitive to the evils of excessive illumination.
Jun’Ichiro Tanazaki, from “In Praise of Shadows”
Post-college, Skyler McLean found himself in LA plagued with hyper fluorescence, misconstrued by his realtor — perhaps due to a mistranslation of values — as “the best” lighting in the city. As Skyler recounted on the too-vintage couch of our Brooklyn Navy Yard studio, the realtor was a fervent advocate for a brighter future, or “PURE RAW ENERGY.”
Forsaken to his pupil-shrinking (contract-subscribed) reality, Skyler sought gentler means of illumination: a light that favored campfires to dentistry, marshmallows to root canals. Inspired by Isamu Noguchi’s singular talent to tame artificial light, Skyler rendered “the best” lighting in Los Angeles dormant via handcrafted fixtures that harnessed the softness of Kozo paper to furnish his home with a fireside glow.
If a Noguchi Lamp made love to Google Earth, Skyler McLean’s light boxes would crawl out of the Digi-terra-womb.
Skyler’s refutation of fluorescence emerged in tandem with a passionate pursuit of Quantum theory (the existential reverberations of his final courses at Stanford University) and a relentless examination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated imagery (which he found to have the jagged aesthetic proclivities of surgical light). Discontent with the homogeneity of AI’s renderings, Skyler planted his own garden of digital seeds, and via a self-coined “un-natural selection” iteratively grew them into his own universe.
While others render repetitive worlds via repetitive algorithms,
Skyler builds his own
— from the “ground” up.
More often than not, AI art represents an algorithm as artist, with human as machine operator. In Skyler McLean’s hands, Artificial Intelligence wields the power of a magical paintbrush — a medium that infinitely extends image-making potential. AI’s potential as a plastic medium only manifests in those practices that write and manipulate the algorithm itself.
Artificial intelligence needs an alchemist. When one submits to an instant-coffee algorithm, their outputs likely reflect the proclivities of a Vitamin D deficient Sim.
“A Bauhaus Painting of Aliens at a Human Petting Zoo”
Of my esoteric, arguably disturbed text inputs provided to the low-IQ AI of DALLE-2, “A Bauhaus Painting of Aliens at a Human Petting Zoo” — design-infused sci-fi phlegm — produced the best work.
“Wide-Angle Shot from Below of an Astronaut with an Athletic Feminine Body Walking with Swagger Towards Camera on Mars in an Infinite Universe Synthwave Digital Art”
This mad lib produced Cosmopolitan’s June, 2022 cover image — a first for Cosmo in its immaculate(ish) AI conception, “and it only took 20 seconds to make.” Perhaps this reproductive speed is AI’s most human-like quality. Of course, a lot led up to those 20 seconds…
Inherent not only in the cover artist’s (uninspired) text prompt, but also its pixel-translated doppelgänger, is another reflux in the our continued regurgitation of space age futurisms. Why does the contemporary future imaginary still contain moonwalking astronauts? We already stepped on extraterrestrial sand. Past tense.
Our notions of the future — at least those tinged with even one dose of optimism — still live in the Space Age.
Since then, we have been avoiding apocalypse, not dreaming.
Stupid Robots
I used to wander the West Village fours on end, Hasselblad in hand, eagerly awaiting “the decisive moment.” My romanticism of photography’s past led me to a college experience spent largely in the darkroom — and I still believe that there is an inherent magic to the gelatin silver print.
It is through the darkroom that I fell in love with (or at least acquired an uncontrollable lust for) photography.
But film is expensive, inconvenient, slow, and an iPhone fits in my pocket. So for multiple years, the exclusively photographed with my iPhone.bThen the low-IQ AI took over, and rendered my phone camera useless.
Hence my departure entirely from analog space.
Traveling the World (Wide Web)
“It is well known that even museum curators often prefer colored pictures to the originals of various objects in their own cases.”
Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media)
Instagram believes that I am perpetually in need of a vintage cantilever chair (not wrong) and a cornucopia of direct-to-consumer (D2C) virtue signals. 20% recycled cotton mid-calf socks certainly absolve one of their coal-powered crypto mining (I recently learned of crypto mining’s ongoing revitalization of near-extinct coal mines to power a gassy multi-generation “fuck you” to our planetary mother).
Devoid of data, one can venture freely into a beautiful refutation of recursive cyborg curation.
Both Alibaba and Fisher Scientific — as I have gained from my digital expeditions of late — know nothing of virtue signaling nor the pastel-laden dopamine hits of the Warby Parker D2C Industrial Complex. Wandering through the endless business-to-business cyber-Costcos, I perpetually had my left pinky, thumb and pointer-finger at the ready (those digits necessary to screenshot); travel-induced curiosity renders every moment ripe with decisive potential. Especially when said travel is entirely motivated by a documentary desire.
A screenshot is a photograph.
A Pseudo-Mathematical Proof
In 1941, Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges published the short story The Library of Babel. Borges imagines a library that houses every possible combination of 25 letters that could be contained within a 410 page book. Within the 410 page book, each page is composed of 40 lines, each line around 80 letters. The total number of the books in the library equates to 25 to the 1,312,000th power, a number so unfathomably large that it can reasonably be described as, or rounded up to infinity. Due to the infinite number of books in Borges’s imaginary library, the library would not only contain every book ever written, but also every possible iteration of the past, present and future. Applying the same logic to a Photoshop document proves the truly limitless capabilities of the software. Within the typical 1920x1080 pixel display there are 2,073,600 pixels. A computer produces color by combining red, green and blue light (described as RGB). The levels of red, green and blue are dictated by a value between 0 and 255, resulting in 16,777,216 possible color combinations. The total possible combination of pixels within a 1920x1080 display is 2,073,600 to the 16,777,216th power, a number that reaches even further into infinity than Borges’s library.
Borgesian logic implies that Photoshop could artificially (or digitally) render not only every photograph ever taken, but also every possible photograph.
“Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony or Chartres cathedral, if executed today, might be simply embarrassing.”
John Barth drops this zinger (in his seminal work The Literature of Exhaustion) to deify the relationship between art and its histori-cultural context. Beethoven, were he alive today, would not even chart. Nicki Minaj’s “Super Freaky Girl” currently holds the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100. This comparison is ripe with digressions, but for now, this shall be my only one.
While scrubbing my skin smooth with exfoliating body wash earlier this evening, I realized that Barth’s notion applies (to the nth degree) to science. Imagine Galileo roaming the streets today, pronouncing that the Earth revolves around the Sun (and instilled with the same genius-cum-narcissist existential dread he assuredly had half a millennium ago).
I would avoid him on the subway, and assume he had smoked a bad batch of K2.
Beethoven would just go to Juilliard then play out his days across the street…
Quantum
“A countless number of our definitions, perhaps all of them, are relational: a mother is a mother because she has a child ; a planet is a planet because it orbits a star ; a predator is such because it hunts prey ; a position in space is there only in relation to something else. Even time exists only as a set of relations.” (Helgoland, 147)
Duchamp
“An ordinary object [could be] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.” (Duchamp)
Trash-thetics
“In 2001, a cleaner swept up beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays arrangted by Damien Hirst at Eyestorm Gallery.: “I didn’t think for a second that it was a work of art,” he said, “it didn’t look much like art to me.”
Mark Wisher, “On the Fate of Artworks” // Art Monthly, July-August 2014
Back when I had a salary, I also had an ashtray on my desk that held three ceramic cigarette butts. I don’t have them anymore.
The company’s cleaners threw them away.
I don’t blame them.
To an eye attuned to the efficient removal of human debris, these ceramic cigarette butts begged to be discarded. To one seeking “art,” they are tiny sculptures, critical of transience and over-consumption — permanently cluttering my desk with the implication of bad breath and a chronic cough.
Exposed Bits, Censored
In 2010, Steve Jobs introduced the retina display.
During his performance, Jobs fixated on a magic number: 300. By squeezing more than 300 pixels into an inch, Apple liberated digital space from its own language (namely, the square “pixel”). By crossing over into a pixel-density beyond the human eye’s potential to delineate, virtual phenomena became virtual realities.
In rendering the digital nature-smooth, Apple foreshadowed our contemporary life-as-uncanny-valley (perhaps it is time to rename “Silicon Valley”); today, the visual delineation of digital and physical phenomena is the standard, not the applause-inducing innovation introduced in 2010 by a black Issey Miyake turtleneck, Levis 501s, and New Balance 992s.
A lack of visual delineation between digital and physical space is today’s standard — a far cry from the days of pong. If I see an exposed “pixel” on my device, I want to swat it away like a fly.
Pixels Are NOT Squares. God save us all.
I recently learned — thanks to Pixar co-founder Alvin Ray Smith’s existentially enlightening A Biography of the Pixel — that a pixel is in fact, not a square. And computer programming’s binary: the infinite chatter of “zeroes and ones,” is only zeroes and ones via analogy.
I was content with the notion that Pornhub, MLB, and Pitchfork (.com) could all be reduced to 01101010101101010110111011101110 in an infinitely repeating cycle; Breasts, baseball stats and the album artwork of (vastly) underrated Childish Gambino albums were just a a summation of squares.
Nope.
High and low voltage.
Radial gradients.
Spreaders?
Nanotech?
What a fucking disaster.
Rebirth of Slick (Smooth like Dat)
What does it mean when a computer can scrub itself of its own artifacts
— fingerprints wiped from a formerly loaded barrel?
Why do we (namely Skyler and myself, but if you can empathize then come vibe) want this erasure of aesthetically digital histories?
An incessant extermination of “pixels” or visually, of angularity, pervades both of our practices.
Why?
Is our mutual quest for all that is smooth our yearning for a world free of technological inadequacies?
Probably not.
It is just not take the (fake) pixel’s time to shine; every dog has its day. Contemporary technological idiosyncrasies, that is, the mistakes our stupid robots make today, will re-emerge as nostalgic artistry in a not-too-distant future. Our 35mm film grain and vinyl record will be the next generation’s “pixel.” For now however, pixels are bad production value, unprofessionalism, the lack of a retina screen. Still a hindrance, we get rid of “pixels,” angularity, dirty digital micro-moments, in search of the smooth.
We exfoliate, whether it be via Gaussian blur, Kozo Paper, or activated-charcoal petite-grain body wash.
We jazz like dat
We freak like dat
We zoom like dat
We out…