THE BRAIN BEHIND THE ART, THE ART BEHIND THE BRAIN
Jesse Damiani is the curator of the exhibition called SMALL V01CE at Honor Fraser Gallery which closed in the spring of 2024. The work of artist Landon Ross featured in the show. The exhibition may have closed but the ideas and conversations live on.
The show looked at the intersection of AI, instinct, intuition, and emotions. We recorded an interview for FUTURO VOL II, with Damiani and Ross (who participated in the show, using amongst other things, brain scans to create his art).
Here is a snippet of their interview. It’s enough to get your brain sparking in all directions.
Event Horizon, 2024 - Landon Ross
Blown acrylic, 24karat gold, nanoparticle pigment, 12 hour directed sound-beam track, UV pigment transfer on copper, volcanic rock and earth collected from California, wooden support structure. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy Honor Fraser Gallery, Photography by Jeff McLane.
JESSE DAMIANI You've worked closely with Antonio Damasio and that was something that really changed the direction of the show. So I'd love it if we could start, before we get to the meat of your piece, with what felt apt about Damasio's work in the context of these questions.
LANDON ROSS In so much of my work, I guess what I try to do is something that I don't think is necessarily new, which artists have done forever, which is to tell origin stories or do self portraiture, but just do it in a way that's different. I think, with respect to AI, intuition and instinct, Damasio’s work is absolutely indispensable because we're getting to a point where these systems are so advanced that there will be consciousness. There will be recursive self-reflection and all the things required to become an agent. But what AI so far doesn't have is sensitivity, homeostatic anchors. Homeostasis is a living cell or system’s need to maintain stability because of vulnerability.
And, you know, AI doesn't have vulnerability. If I pinch you, you're going to swat me away, or you’ll get angry. And that's where emotions and this sort of inscrutable thing that we call intuition comes from. So, I had been working with Antonio for a long time because my idea was to do self-portraiture, but portraits of my mind in different states of emotion and feeling. And we got slowed down because Covid shut the lab down. But then, we developed this great relationship, and his thinking has shaped mine a lot. I wouldn't say that my work focus is really on AI, but when you suggested it as a concept for this show, it did fit in. These questions of where we've been — I mean, when we talk about the future, we have to talk about the past. And that installation was anchoring this monument of human thought and cognition with what we're headed towards, which is not scary, but uncertain.
JD Scary for some.
LR Well, yeah, scary. But also thrilling and exciting and perhaps beautiful. It's all these things. That's why I think Antonio's work was important in this.
Untitled Hieroglyph, 2024 - Landon Ross
Steel, composite, optium acrylic, aluminum, porcelain coat, foil, and chalk 64 x 118 x 4 inches. Image courtesy Honor Fraser Gallery, Photography by Jeff McLane.
The ‘Untitled Hieroglyph’ is a series of original works that explore origins stories or current narratives which are derived and hinted at by nature “once she is asked in the right tone of voice,” rather than those invented by humankind. The work’s inscrutability to most is a feature that requires the viewer to see the objects, which are composed by a monthslong capture of actual theoretical work, conducted some of the top physicists at Caltech, as the aesthetic, drawing in questions of a sort of priesthood, and, like the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt—a modern hieroglyph, also telling a narrative of a quest for ascendance, albeit one that is ontologically anchored.
JD You then also have the Untitled Hieroglyphs, which is an older series, but there's a sort of beautiful symmetry to that triangle of the installation. And speaking of origin stories, could you first share a little bit about what that series is and how you saw it ultimately fitting into the show?
LR Yeah, I think the installation started with the two things in conversation — the event horizon of the Black Hole, which represented the LLM (large language models) or AI, and where we're going in the future, and the past, which was this monument to human thought and cognition. But then in the middle of that, because of this whole idea of intuition, I thought that the hieroglyphs fit. The hieroglyphs are basically large scale blackboards that are full of mostly quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. Some of them have planetary formation science on them, but for the most part, it is quantum gravity or the cosmological constant. These aren’t copies. They are actual captures of months of theoretical works. So they aren’t regenerated. They are the actual human artifacts. That’s what makes them so special. It's the work of theoretical physicists, mainly at Caltech, in fully erasable chalk on a board and with all of their erasure and mistakes.
Sometimes my hand is on it, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, children's hands are on it, sometimes they're not. And because the content is not available to most anyone, you're forced to see it as a painting, which it is. I mean, it's a beautiful object. It's just like if you go to the British Museum and stare at the wall of hieroglyphs, you're like, “well, that's so beautiful and cool,” but you can't read it. This is an origin story too, but it's one that is not inventable. It's only derivable, so therefore it's not arbitrary, but it does require a lot of intuition to arrive at these equations and these truths, or asymptotic truths about the universe.
We're getting closer and closer to a lot of answers. And we'll never get to the answer, because everything seems to be asymptotic. We know there's not going to be a revolution where all of a sudden all of this stuff is wrong because it's not. So I find that to be really interesting. And I find that to require a hell of a lot of, not instinct, but intuition, because you have to know, you have to have had a past, sort of a learned response to what was wrong when you did something and what worked right when you did something. And this isn't in the front of your consciousness when you're thinking about something. Like, if I think you're lying to me — I don't know why, but I can feel it somehow. And that's intuition. So a lot of people look at those boards and they think, well, that's cold calculation, math is boring. And it's not. It's literally figuring out mother nature's secrets when you learn to ask in the right language.
Natural History 1-7, 2024 - Landon Ross
Palladium, 24 karat gold, gallium, cadmium, tin, lead, bismuth, lab grown diamonds (carbon) 13 x 11 inches each. Image courtesy Honor Fraser Gallery, Photography by Jeff McLane.
JD I'd love to prompt you a little bit further because you believe in the ontology of math, that math is not something that we invent, but that we discover. And of course, math and science are integral to the development of the technologies we associate with AI. So could you share a little bit about that?
LR Yeah, I mean, I don't think you can invent math. Or geometry. I don't think you can invent it, but underlying it is a set of relationships that can't be fucked with. Plato was free to describe the five platonic solids. He was not free to invent a sixth one in three-dimensional space. You can do that in four dimensional space, but there are rules, right? And you can see these patterns playing out in elements and atoms, and there is a geometry there. There's no use denying it. And I'm very interested, in my work, in exploring what can only be discovered rather than invented, because there are stories to tell about origins, and about love and about beauty, and all of that is rooted in that because they exist.
Cosmogeny Drawings 33 x 25 inches (83.8 x 63.5cm) Image courtesy Landon Ross.
Works on paper. Marks made using a number of the heaviest non-radioactive elements formed in the last few seconds of a dying star of 8-40 solar masses (8-40M⊕), undergoing catastrophic collapse, or otherwise in the collisions of neutron stars. The only exception is carbon, forged in a prior stage of stellar evolution of stars with a broader range of M⊕ (or red giant). Recalling the work of Alan Turing, the filaments and delicate geometric shapes are meant to counterpose chaos and order as ends of a single spectrum - the underlying structure of the universe. All elements other than hydrogen and helium are forged in stellar nucleosynthesis, but those used to make these drawings are birthed from a star’s spectacular demise. These works resist digital compression, and “the screen,” the mode by which almost all images are consumed today. Elements used are gallium, carbon, palladium, platinum, gold.
very laboratory