Studio Archive

Hsiang-yun Huang Interview with Warren Neidich

August 25, 2024

Hsiang-yun Huang, curator of the 2022 Taipei Digital Art Festival, interviews artist and writer Warren Neidich, whose work was featured in the festival. In 2023, Hsiang-yun Huang attended Warren’s exhibition in Paris. In this conversation, they explore the themes of these events in relation to Warren’s work including concepts like consciousness industry, the pluriverse, algorithmic governmentality, “dry” versus “wet” conceptual art and cognitive activism. 

HSIANG-YUN HUANG: Let’s begin with your recent artwork, “A Proposition for an alt-Parthenon Marbles Recoded,” which we saw together at Priska Pasquer Paris. I’m curious about why you used a photographic representation of a classic Greek marble sculpture as the basis for your artwork. 

WARREN NEIDICH: The full title of the artwork is “A Proposition for an alt-Parthenon Marbles Recoded: The Phantom as Other.” This is the same work that I will be showing at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. Key to this title is that the Parthenon Marbles are “recoded” and present an alternative contemporary meaning for the Parthenon marbles, that Greek sculpture created during its classic period. The original title of the work was “The Elgin Marbles,” named after Lord Elgin who pilfered the work in 1801 from its original site at the Acropolis in Athens. The new name “The Parthenon Marbles” is its new title and is meant to show respect. This artwork is not simply a twenty-first century reengagement with the controversy surrounding its theft and return. The Greek government is currently embroiled in an argument with the British Museum. Like other countries that have been robbed of their cultural antiquities, like the Rosetta Stone which was originally found in 1799 by Napoleon’s forces near the town of Rosetta, Egypt and transferred back to England in 1802 and the Benin Bronzes originally the property of the royal court of the Oba in Benin City, Nigeria, some of which were confiscated by the British during a bloody war with colonial British government, the discussion of reparations are still ongoing. In the case of the Parthenon Marbles, the Greek government has constructed a new Acropolis Museum to reunite the entire work to house it in Athens. As interesting and important as this story is, this “A Proposition for an alt-Parthenon Marbles Recoded: The Phantom as Other” is a conceptual art work that is first concerned with its relation to art history and the Enlightenment. The period of Neoclassicism began in 1760 and continued till the 1790s. It was an aesthetic attitude that stressed harmony, balance, restraint, universality, austerity, and idealism as the fundamental characteristics of beauty. Art historians like Johann Joachim Winckelmann promoted classical Greek sculpture as the essential standard of beauty and spoke of its noble simplicity. Artist’s works like Jacques-Louis David’s “Oath of the Horatio” used classical techniques as a mean to depict scenes which were meant to register qualities like civic virtue and heroism. On the other hand, this work aims to create an antithetical thesis based upon expanded connections and links using a phantomatic approach in elucidating a new burgeoning digital information economy of the other. The Parthenon Marbles in this sculpture is an imperfect figurative representation with bumps and bruises as well a broken arms and legs. The artwork is a multi-input artificial deep learning neural network, each part of which samples the environment according to different regime of patterns and traces of data. Sampling refers to the process of selecting data points from larger datasets, allowing AI to learn. Simply stated, the deep learning neural network is made up of three layers; the input, hidden or middle layer and the output layer. The input layer first gathers then transfers this sampled knowledge to the next hidden layer(s) where it plays a role in sculpting synaptic weights and logics for purposes of computation, mimicking organic neural networks in order to generate outputs. I took the artistic license to use the phantom limb as a metaphor for the sprouting imaginary entities emanating in from the stumps of broken limbs in order to add another kind of data sampling component to the neural networks inner layer. The role of this ‘imperfect’ version of the Parthenon Marbles, broken during removal and transport from Athens to London, is to create an imperfect artificial neural network.

I’m also using artistic license to use this imperfect body as a metaphor for disabilities, in general, and phantom limbs, in particular. From those broken limbs, arms, and legs are sprouting phantom limbs  which, as you can see, I painted directly on the image in green, purple and red. These multiple phantom limbs are all situated in the input layer of the AI and play a part in sampling the world in order to learn and to make predictions, but of a very different kind. They also sample the world and add data sets that represent the ‘Other’ — the queer, the imperfect, the specter, the ghost, the neural diverse — in the sampling process. Together, the Parthenon Marbles and their phantoms make up the information sampled by the input layer of the deep learning neural network. Therefore, it’s not just the Enlightenment — its conceptual relation to beauty and perfection — that determines what patterns are sampled from the worldly array, but also its disfigured mirror image represented by this phantom energy. This network has been generated a pluriverse of epistemologies beyond a Eurocentric enlightened one in the end leading to a form of algorithmic government, the so called alt singularity, which is more inclusive, caring, planetary, empathic and kind.

HH: Right. So, all these different elements are part of the input for the AI deep learning system. I  think one of the important aspects of this artwork is that you’re trying to open up and embrace  different epistemologies and expand the rigid definition of consciousness to include both human and  nonhuman actors. I think the exhibition in Paris was very well curated because, as you enter, you see your work alongside other pieces that present different epistemologies including ideas like plant consciousness. Everything connects back to this overarching idea. When this artwork is presented with other works, it feels more complete. Could you elaborate on this more?

WN: As you know, I was also the curator of that exhibition called We don’t want to live in a Universe,  We want to live in a Pluriverse!. The concept was that I don’t want to live in a world with a singular,  unitary epistemology, remnant of the Enlightenment. I think your first question is related to the second because, as you pointed out, the Enlightenment has gotten a bad reputation recently for several reasons. In the name of the Enlightenment, there was a lot of destruction, killing, and cultural epistemicide. However, perhaps that had to partially do with how it was used by colonialism and capitalism. Certainly this was true of the British in Benin City and the Spanish in Central and South America. We know that artificial neural networks have been accused of bias in facial recognition software and bank loans and this bias is the lingering effect of an optimized rational scientific method which leaves its trace in the world and then is sampled by AI. The unconscious, implicit, arrogance of the Eurocentric, heterosexual male figure imposing its values on other civilizations in the name of Enlightenment skews learning away from a pluriverse condition. The pluriverse refers to the cultivation of diverse ways of knowing and living and embraces all epistemologies. Instead of a humanist AI, why not create a posthuman AI? For example, in Cameroon the French imposed their culture and language upon the Indigenous people while also destroying remnants of their native cultures and languages which left a vacuum, or phantom, a hole of absence in the fabric of their own culture. This is a significant issue of colonialism and the Enlightenment. In colonialism, they were imposing a Eurocentric ideal of what medicine, culture, and language should be. This exhibition was about moving away from this uniform, universal approach and toward a pluriverse, one inhabited by many epistemologies that include ancestral knowledges of the Global South and a diversity of epistemologies in a new conceptual framework of the planetary Earthling. It expands the meaning of the scientific include ancestral knowledge.

HH: I think this is crucial because colonialism is still ongoing, as evidenced by the fact that we’re speaking in English and engaging in this contemporary art system. It will likely scale up with AI. I’m more pessimistic. I remember that algorithmic biases are also a key concept in this sculpture, right?

WN: Yes. As I said before, algorithmic bias is one of the negative consequences.

HH: With AI, because of this language model mainly being in English, smaller community languages and data are not being included and it will become even more severe when scaled up, leading to the disappearance of other epistemologies. I’m wondering about your perspective on this and how you want to address it in your artwork.

WN: Fundamentally, there’s something called algorithmic governmentality. The idea of algorithmic governmentality suggests that AI algorithms could one day subsume human governance. Many people are discussing this concept including Antoinette Rouvroy, who was a student of Bernard Stiegler. This idea is also elaborated and embraced by people like Shoshana Zuboff who, in writing about what she calls the ‘Big Other,’ highlights how statistical analysis of captured data creates new opportunities for preemptive monetization and profit. For instance, when Amazon suggests a travel destination after you’ve been searching about it; that’s preemptive monetization. But it goes even further. Vacation suggestions for places can appear without you even searching, based on a granular analysis of your data. Search engines don’t just track what you search but how you search. For example, some may start with general searches for great hotels, beaches, or destinations, while others may begin by looking up a specific location then move to related searches. This style of searching is key, and preemptive monetization means it could anticipate your interest before you even search. That’s what I call the consciousness industry. Instead of the society of the spectacle, which was a Situationist idea from the 1950s related to television and new media, the consciousness industry is a manifestation of big data and the Big Other and in the future the Statisticon.

I’m not saying it exists now. I’m just projecting into the future and noticing these tendencies. I’m speculating that it’s possible that new devices interfacing with the brain — specifically brain-computer interfaces, optogenetics, and systems like ChatGPT — could reach a level where they could collect data from both your unconscious, non-conscious and conscious thoughts. That’s how preemptive monetization could become even more exact, precise and elaborate; understanding not only what you’re doing now and what you may do in the future, but what you think now and also what you might want to think in the future. This brings me to what I call cognitive activism. There are three different kinds of activism; past, present and future. Cognitive activism is a type of future activism, but maybe I’m getting off track here.

HH: No worries. I actually think this will happen in the future. I’ve heard, though it’s hard to confirm, that algorithms on platforms like TikTok and Threads are approaching this level and becoming more than just basic recommendation algorithms.

WN: Yes, especially in a language-based society, these language-based apparatuses like ChatGPT are incredibly powerful. ChatGPT, brain-computer interfaces and optogenetics (which allows memories to be turned on or off) together operating as a machinic assemblage and could create an integrated, entangled form of alternative consciousness or “mindness,” a future artificial connectome. A connectome is an all encompassing map of all the connections of the brain. It is a complex fingerprint and portrays how each of us have different brains. What makes us stubborn Singularities! What I’m arguing is that the Big Other transitions to the Statisticon, when the brain itself becomes part of the Big Other’s sources; when conscious and unconscious thoughts become origin points of data upon, highly sophisticated forms of generative a generative AI are produced.

I made a piece in 2015 called “The Statisticon,” shown in many places including Berlin and New York, which explores this concept. It’s about the transition from Foucault’s disciplinary society to Deleuze’s society of control and finally to the Statisticon. The next manifestation of that work is a big neon sculpture that I’ve been working on. I am also showing an early video of in Taiwan. It was first shown at Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin. It may sound like science fiction but it’s not far-fetched. Imagine a paraplegic person who, using brain waves, moves a cursor on a screen which then operates a robotic arm or directs their wheelchair’s motion. Paraplegics learn to generate brain waves that interact with a brain-computer interface where a coded algorithm translates that energy into  instructions used to move a cursor on a screen that controls robotic appendages or the wheelchair itself. If this technology can decode a brain wave to do this, it is plausible that one day this same external device with potential of a Super AI could do the opposite. First, it could learn the language of these codes generated by the brain and then impose them. When brain-computer interfaces combine with language-based AI like ChatGPT and text-to-image generators such as DALL-E, it might be possible that an externalized artificial connectome-Super AI with a purpose could invent newly coded instructions that could send information the other way, into the brain. The input generated from this external device could send electrical signals into the brain, or even into a population of brains, disrupting or altering their electrical activity.

HH: I discussed this with a friend doing human-machine interface research. He said it’s possible but right now the issue is that we still can’t identify which parts of the brain control or manipulate different parts of the body and consciousness. It’s still challenging to map which parts connect to what function.

WN: That’s what I keep saying. We’re not there yet but with the kind of money and energy that big tech companies are investing, anything has become possible. Their acceleration needs to be slowed down. Who could have imagined brain-computer interfaces 20 years ago? It was total science fiction. It’s only in the last 5 to 10 years that it’s become a real thing and now it’s being used for video games with brain waves even being transferred through the internet. Instead of an implantable brain-computer interface that has to be placed under the skull, it’s now also something you can wear as an external headset, although the implantable chip is still driving investment. And it’s already involved with virtual reality; there are already virtual reality brain-computer interfaces being experimented with in the neuro-rehabilitative arena. So, in 10 or 15 years from now, the idea of an external machinic non-human agent sending codes into the brain through these devices could become a reality. If these devices like brain-computer interfaces that are worn on your head are already here, maybe they can eventually be used for transmission in both directions, creating a back-and-forth communication: brain-computer-brain.

The ultimate control could be fostered upon the brain’s neuroplasticity. Again, it might be possible, though speculative, that these devices could send information into the brain and alter its neural  dispositions during critical or sensitive periods in which the brain’s neural plasticity is most delicate and susceptible. The externalized machinic brain could intervene with the brain’s neuroplasticity and could potentially shape the brain according to its own desire. This is the ultimate danger of the neural economy and neural capitalism — a neural despotism in which the architecture of the brain is at stake. In some ways, this is already happening. For instance, look at the effect of green washing and social media. We humans cannot confront climate change because our neural plasticity has already been shaped by anthropocenic technologies. (Anthropocenic comes from the word Anthropocene; the period we are now in in which humans are having a massive effect on the earth’s crust and atmosphere.) The future technologies would simply make the situation worse, and it would happen stealthily. It’s a new form of input that is post-phenomenological because it doesn’t relate to happenings and relations occurring in the sensorium of real space and real time. It uses an artificial contrived data set to teach an unsupervised machine learning environment. It wouldn’t be coming in through the senses like sight, sound, smell or touch, but rather entering the brain further along in its processing, perhaps going directly to the visual cortex, the fusiform gyrus, the temporal lobe or other specific areas. It wouldn’t go through the senses anymore. This is what I mean by post-phenomenological, where it’s no longer dependent on the sensible. Again, it’s all speculative but it’s well-founded speculation.

HH: I think so, too. You weren’t at the Taipei exhibit in-person but I positioned your work to face two other artworks. One of them, titled “Human-like non-human – HAOS human cognition liberation project,” was speculative. It involved something like a Neuralink chip but designed to be placed in the mouth to electrify the tongue to create a new kind of sense connected to the brain. This would create new neural links, allowing people to use their tongue to distinguish whether an image is a deep fake or not.

WN: That’s interesting because there was this amazing guy, Paul Bach-y-Rita, who passed away but was active in the 80s and 90s. I invited him to one of my conferences at Goldsmiths. He was famous for  putting electrodes on the tongue to help people see by teaching the visual cortex through these tongue mounted devices. That could be interesting for your friend’s work; they probably already know about it.

HH: I wish you could have been there. Your installation was hanging from the ceiling, trailing down from the second to the first floor, so it looked a bit like a brain with neural links. Then, there was another piece called “War of Memory,” the only black box artwork. For “War of Memory,”  the artist Yi-Shan Shih created a kind of black box to explore social media. Inside were four screens showing TikTok, Facebook and Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media platform, creating a simulated life. The artist made a semi-fake account to introduce tech related to Taiwan-China  relations, arguing that our memory or history, particularly between Taiwan and China, can be changed through social media data, like a memory war. China, in particular, has been hiring people to spread the “One China” ideology online. They have vast resources and people, so when you search you get their ideology, potentially altering history. This idea really connects with your artwork from another angle.

WN: Definitely, definitely.

HH: That’s why I put those three artworks together to discuss the concept of the consciousness industry.

WN: Yes, it’s a very complex problem. I wasn’t there unfortunately but I understand the connections you’re making with these works.

HH: I think we’ve now sufficiently covered the consciousness industry and its relation to the Taipei Digital Art Festival. Now I’d like to ask you to elaborate a bit more on this idea of psychotropic drugs. I remember you were mentioning ayahuasca. In the exhibition in Paris there was another artwork dealing with plants and AI, right?

WN: Right. That was Elena Bajo’s tapestry work, “Words Buried in Your Petals (Datura Dreams).”

HH: Do you think psychic energy or psychedelic drugs might present one way out of this consciousness industry?

WN: Yes. I mean, what’s really interesting is first, just to give a bit of background, it’s not necessarily universally accepted but I believe we’re in this moment of cognitive capitalism where the mind and brain are the new factories of the 21st century. In the late 20th century, we were no longer only proletariats working on assembly lines to create objects and the surplus value they produce with our bodies. Now, we are what is called cognitariat, or mental laborers, working in front of screens, swiping and clicking to create data. The data, as we’ve discussed, isn’t just passively collected; it’s becoming powerful because we’re spending so much time in virtual environments on these screens, which are having an impact on the brain’s neural architecture and neuroplasticity. That was the whole argument about brain-computer interfaces, which could eventually become cognitive dispositifs and apparatuses that create these kinds of govermentalized conditions. But the key thing here, and this ties to your question, is that, when we look back at Fordism, the surplus value of proletarian labor was increased by something called Taylorism, a managerial technique developed by Frederick Taylor in the United States. Taylorism was about refining and standardizing work processes and the physical actions carried out by the working body to make them more efficient in work and which increased surplus value, the value left over after the costs of human labor and capital investment was subtracted from profits. Now, with the cognitariat, the body isn’t as important, so these Taylorist managerial techniques aren’t as important. We’re doing cognitive labor, not physical bodily labor — although there is a cognitive element in the way that the machine creates a kind of intelligence through which the proletariat together create an ensemble, a collective brain object and things like that — but it’s not the primary thing. When proletariats become cognitariats, they’re doing mental labor. Their body, at least at this point, is passive. It’s sitting in a chair, almost like in a movie theater. You’re using that same suturing techniques that were so important to a certain type of French film theory in the 1970s and 80s, the suturing of the individual to the action on the screen. Now we’re being sutured to an engaged activity with the internet or virtual reality, creating data.

What I argue is that, instead of Taylorism, we have what I call Hebbianism. The term is based on the famous Canadian neuropsychologist Donald Hebb who was the first to propose that “neurons that fire  together, wire together.” This idea has been further developed by important neuroscientists, such as Jean Pierre Changeux and Gerald Edelman, who talk about how the environment sculpts the brain’s  neuroplasticity. Omnipresent, powerful and constantly recurring environmental stimulations sculpt the way the brain works over time. This model is also used in deep learning neural networks in the hidden layer to understand the way synaptic weights in artificial neural networks are formed. In my Parthenon Marbles deep learning network, the input from the marbles and the phantom limbs together sculpts the synaptic weights of the artificial neural network creating a specific kind of architecture. Hebbianism, affecting the cognitariat, is interesting because, like Taylorism, it involves repetitive relationships. In Taylorism, the body’s position on the assembly line is based on ergonomic principles to maximize efficiency, like in a car’s driver seat where everything is within reach. The brain, too, can be ergonomically designed to interact with the internet and virtual platforms. Since the start of the internet, software, websites and especially computer games have introduced cognitive ergonomics, or the ergonomics of how the mind works with these platforms.

The term “artificial neural networks” comes from ideas about how neural networks in the brain work. There’s been an increasing entanglement in the design of artificial neural networks with our understanding of how neural networks in the brain operate. A scientist named Frank Rosenblatt originally created the first artificial neural network which he based on the anatomical structure retina, the thin light sensitive film that covers the surface of the inner surface of the eye. Now they’re using as a model the visual system of the cerebral cortex, so called ventral stream from the occipital cortex to the inferior temporal lobe, which deals with object recognition for modeling artificial neural networks engaged with facial recognition. There’s this incredible closeness in these concepts and I call that cognitive ergonomics. The cognitive laborer is continuously increasing their mental surplus value, refining their mental efficiency, which is becoming more closely tied to the activities and work they’re doing on the internet. Even the example of preemptive monetization is related to cognitive ergonomics. The perfect way and means of cognitive ergonomic would be a machinic sculpting of the brain’s neural plasticity, one which might result from interaction with digital technics in the very young during critical periods of brain development when the brain’s neural plasticity is most malleable. So, while Taylorism focused on the optimization of physical labor on the assembly line, Hebbianism, the idea that mental processes can be refined through material engagement and sculpting of neural networks in the perceptual cognitive system for optimal engagement with screens, has become a kind of cognitive surplus value. We have restrictions on child labor in the industrial workplace; perhaps we should consider age related restrictions in the digital workplace.

Before getting into ayahuasca, which I’ll argue represents the ‘brain without organs,’ I need to cover one more foundational concept. My interpretation of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s idea of the ‘body without organs,’ which they themselves borrowed from Antonin Artaud in their books A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus. They use this idea to describe the disruption of relationships like the Oedipus complex; it acts as a device of schizoanalysis. I’m arguing that, in the context of Fordism and the workplace, the physical ergonomics I mentioned, which situates the worker on the assembly line,  becomes disrupted in a body that is not normal or is atypical. The synergy of body and machine is made less perfect and surplus value is decreased. For cognitive workers, the body without organs as a laboring body on the assembly line is no longer an adequate form of resistance for the cognitive laborer so another term needs to be invented. This is why I developed the idea of the ‘brain without organs.’ This concept describes a rhizomatic brain, a situated intracranial and extracranial continuum; it’s the meaty brain inside your skull but it’s also an external brain composed of social, political, economic and historical relations that were included in its rendering. It includes multispecies relations like microbial connections in the stomach and the cosmological relationship to the dust from the Big Bang. This brain isn’t static. It’s a ‘becoming’ brain, not a ‘being’ brain; a becoming brain, which is antithetical to a neural or cognitive ergonomic model of cognitive efficiency. It disrupts mental surplus value and frees and emancipates the laborer, the cognitive worker.

Now, ayahuasca, as I see it, is a drug that induces this ‘brain without organs’ state. It fragments and alters cognition, creating a brain no longer optimized for efficiency. Ayahuasca is known to affect the brain’s  neural plasticity, so its effects can be more long term and physical. It operates as an overwhelming serotonergic stimulator. When you take something like ayahuasca the outside world is experienced in very different ways. Ayahuasca, for example, opens up a gateway on the postsynaptic membrane that leads to a hallucinogenic cascade. It has an extra amine that connects it to another postsynaptic catalytic site, triggering the hallucinogenic effect which leaves memories and alters the brain’s structure. The brain becomes emancipated, disconnected from its developmental ergonomic architecture, so it thinks, operates  and perceives differently. It connects to nature in a way that isn’t alienated. If you’ve taken ayahuasca or LSD, you understand it’s a return to an originary relationship to primary nature, not the secondary,  constructed nature we experience today. It leaves traces as memories of those experiences are very instructional for future encounters with the world. But these traces make the cognitive worker less efficient as a mental laborer, more prone to resist the ergonomically contrived networks that suture him or her seamlessly to the neural-digital circuit. Just as the body without organs decreased physical surplus value, so does the brain without organs disrupt the mental surplus value of the cognitariat.

HH: At this point, I want to connect to Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s article about your work written for your exhibition in Paris. This ties back to the affective turn in philosophy and new ideas of subjectivity. One of the most well-known sources of this is probably Deleuze, who uses this idea to connect to the definition of art. If you remember, he wrote that the “completion of art leads to an endless infinity of sensation.” I would like to connect this point to your views on technology and the premises of your artworks.

WN: Are you relating to my ideas of how the phantom limb and psychic energy work within the piece? Because, you know, there is this book by Brian Massumi, The Parables for the Virtual (2002), in which he argues that in late capitalism any relationship to the image is limited by the semantic and semiotic level of language, and that it must be supplemented. He creates this theory of affect based on Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon, which is distinct from the theory of emotion where affect is unqualified and emotion is qualified. So, affect works like this; it is non-distinct and unqualified, whereas emotion is relating to some specific thing or specific event and affect is much more dispersed and just a kind of intensity. Is that right?

HH: Yes, that’s what I mean. Because most traditional artworks still focus on being a combination of sensations, you create certain kinds of emotions or you are expressing your emotion through your artwork. From what you’ve said here, and as our critic Alex has also noticed, you are also working on a different definition of artworks that is based on affect and not emotion.

WN: It’s really interesting that you say that. I think you’ve come upon something that took me almost 40 years of being an artist to come up with. Maybe I’m wrong, and if I’m not understanding you correctly  please interrupt me. In December of 2022 I curated a show in New York called Wet Conceptualism. All my work is very conceptual; as you can see, it’s all text-based and about ideas. It’s not image-based, it’s  text-based. I’m not making pretty pictures. I’m dealing with language and that connects me back to conceptual art, where I make a distinction between “dry” and “wet” conceptual art.

Dry conceptual art takes us to the beginnings of conceptual art in the 1960s with Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and Sol LeWitt. It was all about language and it was very restrained and cold. Emotion was antithetical to it. It didn’t have color. It was usually black and white. It was about the definitions, library definitions. It was really Kantian in the sense that it was about transcendental idealism and it was about creating what was called the dematerialized object, an artwork as immaterial as a thought. It asked: Could you create an artwork as immaterial as a mental image in your mind’s eye? With this exhibition of 10 artists, I argued that, first of all, in that original dry conceptualism there were few people of color. It wasn’t planetary at all. It was really Enlightened, Eurocentric and Caucasian and they had gatekeepers like Joseph Kosuth. At that time minimalism, post-minimal, conceptual art and pop art were all part of the same mix, like a vegetable soup, they had to create some sort of differences to define and distinguish what they were doing from what other people were doing. But, you know, they also excluded “emotional” women; you know, the “emotionally distracted” women mostly weren’t allowed. Artists like Martha Rosler who did “Semiotics of the Kitchen” weren’t included. Yoko Ono wasn’t included. They were doing a different kind of conceptual work which I designated as Wet Conceptualism in opposition to Dry Conceptualism. Mary Kelly’s “Post-Partum Document” is one of the great conceptual artworks of all time but it was “wet.” It was about her child’s diapers, you know? I mean, it was very wet and it didn’t fit into the dry conceptual motif, so they were excluded.

What happened was that around 1979 or 1980 the importance of the dematerialized object gave way to the power of immaterial labor. So, another kind of conceptual art, which I call wet conceptualism, emerged. The term wet originated in the work of Adrian Piper’s “Catalysis III,” in which the artist walked around New York City wearing a shirt emblazoned with the words ‘WET’ painted on it. It has to do with the sea or la mer. It has to do with the state of liquidity and connectivity.

HH: Non-binary?

WN: Exactly. It’s totally non-binary; there’s no distinction between right and left. It’s all a continuum. So, what happened was that this work was very, very colorful. There were artists like Martha Rosler, as I  mentioned already; Charles Gaines, whose work is based on the grid but it is really, really colorful and very performative; and Olu Oguibe, from Nigeria, who had these sneakers that he found with colors of the  American flag. Leslie Hewitt’s “Untitled (Dreambook or Axis of the Ellipse)” and Constance DeJong’s “The Three Dakini Mirrors (of the body speech and mind)” were great additions. And many other artists would  have been included if space and funding had been available — like Mary Kell, Yoko Ono, and Lauren Halsey. Felix Gonzalez Torres was having an exhibition simultaneously at David Zwirner Gallery and was not available.

To answer your question, I think they were very affective, very emotional. This idea of affect becomes a very important part of conceptual art. When people would come and see my work I would tell them I was a conceptual artist and they’d say: this doesn’t look like conceptual art. So, I had to create a category for my own work based on theory that emerged from my art practice. Wet conceptualists create their own  theory. They’re not just re-coding Kant, Wittgenstein or Merleau-Ponty and putting their quotes in the form of a dictionary definition on a canvas. That was important work for that time but it’s not as important now. Artists have to utilize their own material, practices, histories, and ideas of space and time to disrupt and estrange the techno-cultural social environment so as to require philosophers to retool and create new kinds of philosophy. Art comes before philosophy, not after.

HH: That’s why I changed from a philosophy major to art. I think you answered my question because I’m also researching how some artworks lean more toward theory of affect, while others traditionally focus on emotion; more contemporary works are shifting toward affect.

WN: I think it’s more about intensity. Affect is not directed; it’s about intensity but it’s free-floating. Emotion can be layered on top of affect. Emotions can use affect as the platform.

HH: Art can be inconsistent; unlike philosophy where, if you make an argument, you need to be consistent and not have premises that contradict each other. But if your artworks aim to be consistent, then focusing on affect is crucial as it aligns with ideas like the consciousness industry and your definition of technology. It connects human, nonhuman and the whole consciousness of the environment and sociocultural context.

WN: That’s a good point. Affect is the glue or the stuff that binds everything together. It enables that kind of intracranial-extracranial continuum. Affect is that sticky material allowing for multispecies cognition, cosmic cognition, the history of technology, and what Bernard Stiegler called exosomatic organogenesis, the history of technology from two million years ago and its development from Homo habilis to Homo erectus, and the evolution of certain brain structures like the frontal cortex and parts of the temporal lobe in relationship to technological these advancements.

You know, that is also part of this entanglement; this techno-neuro entanglement of which ChatGPT is the latest manifestation. What’s interesting, and I think it relates to your idea of affect, is that the history of  instrumentalization, the history of technology, has predominantly been defined by anthropocentric and anthropocenic technologies. The development of fire to burn the Earth and cook meat, the spear point to hunt, kill and skin, the technology of slash-and-burn agriculture, the steam engine, the atomic bomb and now ChatGPT are all anthropocenic. Exosomatic organogenesis is an anthropocenic exosomatic organogenesis and is part of the whole developmental schema that includes the brain and technology. It is a maieutics, or mirroring.

HH: This leads us to the last of these interconnected questions, tied to your idea of a cybernetic posthuman superintelligence . . .

WN: Yes, that’s the whole point of my piece, “A Proposition for an alt-Parthenon Marbles Recoded: The Phantom as Other.” I use the word “proposition” intentionally. It’s a term often used in dry conceptualism. Also, the phantom as “Other” — the phantom is affect; it is the “Other,” the queer, and it disrupts the normative energy, sculpting and changing the architecture of the middle or hidden layer of this deep learning artificial neural network, then outputs it as what I call an alternative singularity or alt-Singularity. The alternative singularity is not the typical singularity or superintelligence as usually understood. The Ray Kurzweil singularity — this techno-optimism, which I’m totally against — is what my work resists. The concept of the brain without organs is an idea of resistance against neural capitalism. I hope that’s clear. People sometimes think I’m for these technologies but I’m not. I’m making them visible using cognitive activism, a type of activism that stands against futurology, against the future these technologies promise which may bring new kinds of despotism. The Ray Kurzweil singularity is based on a humanistic ideal, one of a heterosexual, white, Eurocentric male who embodies infinite specialness and supremacy over all other creatures and human beings. These are the engineers behind these new technologies. They are creating a very despotic type of superintelligence.

Now, superintelligence, or the singularity, is not the singularity of philosophy; it’s a technological singularity. It means that when artificial intelligence can match or even surpass human intelligence, you won’t be able to tell if a human or an AI made something or was on the phone with you. People often say: don’t worry, we’ll never get to that point. But that’s not true. The singularity is also the moment when machines are curating, designing, and coding themselves — possibly using languages that are completely foreign or alien to us. This is key because these technological optimists or positivists do not fully understand what the singularity could mean. Or maybe they actually do and pretending not to.

Over the last 40 years — and this is key to my piece — posthumanist philosophy has pushed back against humanistic regularities dominated by patriarchal values and has developed a special form of posthumanism. This view displaces “man” as the center and producer of reason and the measure of all things. This is what I was talking about in the very beginning, the ideal of maleness is connected to the idea of the anthropos. So, the anthropocenic brain is a result of this overwhelming of the anthropogenic and its connection to human specialness. From this posthuman philosophical perspective, this hegemonic male has been moved to the side, descended or displaced to provide room for a more inclusive concept that includes women, persons of color, disabled people, people from the LGBTQIA+ community and interspecies entities.

That’s what the “alt-Singularity” means and that’s why in my sculpture I reference Indigenous knowledge and the pluriverse. I also use “epistemicide” but I cross the word out as a way to question the European humanistic tenets tied to progress and modernism. I’m trying to create a superintelligence based on a pluriverse and a concept of cognitive justice; a poetic and empathic Singularity. On the sculpture, there are two arrows going down from the “alt-Singularity.” One arrow points to Western civilization and the other splits off toward the pluriverse. Is that clear?

HH: Yes, I think that’s one of the main points of your artwork. We go from algorithm bias and the consciousness industry to a kind of resistance through affect and phantom psychic energy, leading to this new idea of cybernetic posthuman superintelligence.

WN: Exactly.

The hanging sculpture “Brain Without Organs” is composed of constellations of levitating branches glowing in white neon tubing. These marks represent sulci (the grooves) and gyri (the folds) on the outer layer of the brain. The sulci and gyri enable the brain to contain more surface area and they also serve as mapping devices for scientists who delineate areas of the brain. Neidich uses a Situationist method of détournement to create an alternative arrangement free from the constraints of an overall plan. In this case, as presented at MONA, Neidich is calling for the brain to become a Chthulucene or Ecocene Brain rather than one which is modeled on the values of the Anthropocene. His hope is to produce technologically friendly ecological machines and systems which will produce new forms of what the Norwegian ecologist Arne Naess referred to as the ecological self, bound to the tenants of deep ecology. In deep ecology humans are bound to nature not dissociated from it. Instead of considering humans superior to other life forms understands them to be equal. Humans are therefore linked to the biosphere and connected to biodiversity.

“The Strange Afterlife of Einstein’s Brain,” is a wall mounted sculpture of branching white and red neon shapes that represent the folds in a section of Einstein’s cerebral cortex. The neon elements are simultaneously gestural, indexical, and abstract. Some studies of Einstein’s brain have found several anomalies that distinguish it from typical human brains. In the work these unique folds are delineated by red neon tubing. By highlighting the neurodivergence of one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century the work brings forth the suggestion that neurodiversity is a generator of possibility, rather than limitations.

A small room filled with black light contains paintings that illustrate the brain both anatomically and abstractly. The folds of the brain branch into emojis, text, and symbolism, bringing to mind the social and political nature of cognitive capitalism in which material labor has been replaced by immaterial labor. The fluorescent marks are reminiscent of diagrams, psychedelic paintings, and text threads, mimicking the expansive use of symbolism in attention economies, but also estranging them from their original context.

In destabilizing symbols for the brain, information, and communication Neidich creates space to consider the way our brains are being rewired by our social conditions. As social and political systems are rapidly changing due to neural networks like the internet, Neidich believes it is possible to expand the expectations and constraints society has applied to the mind through artistic navigation. Neidich’s subtitle for the exhibition, An Aporia of Care, refers to the philosophical concept for a state of puzzlement or doubt. For Neidich aporia serves as a metaphor with which to understand the notion of care during a time when the world is increasingly interconnected. “Art as a form of mental hacking can provide an escape from this imminent disaster – if only we have the consciousness and courage to do so!” states Warren Neidich.

Artists Are Essential Workers/Art Is An Essential Service for the occasion of a special reading at The Fireplace Project by Warren Neidich

My first act was to transport a 76 x 126 inch solar powered electronic highway bulletin board (used by municipalities for messaging passerbys) from its normal resting place alongside freeways and roads to the Guild Hall Museum parking lot where its size and context produced an uncanny presence. Situating an artwork in a parking space reestablished a trend I had already initiated in my now infamous Drive-By-Art exhibition in which formerly unused quasi-public spaces were annexed for cultural provocation. The artwork then circulated throughout South Fork travelling to the Leiber Museum as part of the exhibition, Garden of Friends, to finally rest at The Fireplace Project. At each site, the work reacted to a specific set of contingencies embodied by the sense of place it occupied. At Guild Hall, as I mentioned, it colonized an alternative space beyond the hermetically sealed white cube normally used to display artworks. At the Leiber Collection, it joined a group of friends already exhibiting there, many of whom I had met through the Drive-By-Art project. In its final presentation at The Fireplace Project situated alongside Spring Fireplace Road directed towards oncoming traffic, it finally made it to a situation where it’s dual identity as both artwork and highway apparatus was allowed to express itself. Here it fulfills its historic purpose by engaging the simulated history and nostalgia of the Springs, most notably the Pollock-Krasner House just down the road, as the birthplace of Abstract Expression. However, Andy Warhol lived in Montauk, as did Peter Beard. Dennis Oppenheim raised hell here and, of course, we can’t forget the late, great Keith Sonnier, or the contemporary artists who call this their home; Eric Fischl, April Gornik, Mary Heilmann, and all the artists in this show.

In this rarefied cultural context the message board becomes a readymade platform with which to enunciate messages both troubling and significant. Can one say that “artists are essential workers” and “art is an essential service” especially during this global pandemic? Essential worker and essential service are terms usually reserved for the brave medical personnel on the front lines of the therapeutic panopticon established to battle disease at the medical frontier. At odds with this role, the artist’s position in society is as an outlier, bad boy/girl, anarchist, and recently entrepreneur. This pathos haunts deep pockets and makes the spectator uneasy. No doubt this also has something to with the recent denigration of the artist and artwork as a place of power and importance at the hands of the neoliberal art market, where cultural meaning and value have been subsumed by market value.

I am a romantic and this very romantic notion of an artist reaches back to the beginning of Modernism (and Romanticism before that). Artworks maintained an aura and provoked in the spectator a sense of wonder, soothed the aching soul and challenged crystallized dogma through its radical and enigmatic presentation. That is the rub from which this work establishes its pithy phraseology and creates a platform for the resuscitation of a bygone artistic purpose. I want to find new breaths and rhythms in the respirations of new forms of enunciation that my poetic verse launches in this moment of nihilism. For me, art is life and without it life is not worth living; a fortress against the agony of this interminable bungling of the Covid pandemic at the hands of an unruly narcissism and neoliberal fanatic federalism.

My piece is about asking a question. Can we imagine the healed human body without the healed human spirit? Is it enough? What will the post-pandemic art world and art system look like? Maybe it’s time to renegotiate the status of art as a commodity fetish, its primary raison d’etre, and rather understand the role of the artist and his or her production as a means with which to heal and generate social justice. With half of museums on the edge of bankruptcy and an equal number of galleries on the edge of collapse, the artist as a producer of alternative states of consciousness and solidarity is more crucial than ever.

ENGLISH:

The Statisticon Neon (2017) pays homage to Joseph Beuys monumental work Das Kapital Raum 1970-1977 originally shown in the German Pavillon in Venice in 1980 and today on loan to Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie as part of Erich Marx’s Beuys-Block. Neidich mounts his diagrammatic work in multicolored neon upon a non-formal arrangement of black boards that echo the original Beuys’ installation much as a technicolor film would a black and white. His neon looks at the relationship between art and society some forty years later taking into account the role of the internet and its effect on labor and capital.

The 21^st century has been called the century of the brain and recently we have transitioned from Post-fordism to cognitive capitalism where the mind and brain are the new factories of the 21^st century. While the internet was still an experimental paradigm at the time of Beuys’ work we now labor for free on Facebook, Instagram and Google producing data that creates individual data profiles, later sold to corporations and security firms. Today, formal subsumption of the labor of the proletariat has transitioned to real subsumption, in which our entire life is consumed by work, and we have become cognitariats. The Neon Statisticon links this development with the recent neurologic turn in which the action of capitalism is directed to the brains neural plasticity something, which Neidich has called neuropower or Neuromacht.

Color of Politics

Color like money and language has become deregulated. Color is no longer tethered to form and meaning and becomes a vehicle through which emancipated feelings, political intrigues and resistance to institutional normalization processes can become realized. Warren Neidich uses color to recoup the political conditions of creating meaning – summarized in the three part neon-painting Red, White, and Blue (2007).

In the Afterimage Paintings, (2016) red neon sculptures spell the names of German emigrants Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler and Lion Feuchtwanger all of which were later blacklisted in Hollywood as communists and thus never were granted a star on Hollywood Boulevard. Neidich remedies this by activating complementary colored afterimages that are then projected upon empty painted stars mimicking those found on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In the Archive of False Accusations (2016) vitrines illuminated by lavender neon light display found press clippings reporting on what has become known as The Lavender Scare – a less known facet of Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt to root out communist sympathizers.

In a second room a large three-dimensional cloudlike sculpture is installed: Pizzagate – named after the infamous conspiracy tale culminating in sniper Edgar Welch wanting to rescue the supposed sexually abused children he believed to held in the basement of Comet Ping Pong. Pizzagate exposes the apparatuses and patterns of flow and connectivity that generate False News and define click bait as well as understanding that in cognitive capitalism the new site of governmentalization in the new attention economy is the brain’s neural plasticity, especially that found in the frontal cortex where attention and working memory are located. It also shows that the still virulent rumor based entirely on Fake News by now reaches well into the art world. If you want to find out how that works without fault you should try out Neidich’s most recent sculpture the small experimental setup Trump Cup (2017).

DEUTSCH:

The Statisticon Neon (2017) ist eine Hommage an Joseph Beuys’ monumentales Werk Das Kapital Raum 1970-1977, das zuerst 1980 im Deutschen Pavillon in Venedig zu sehen war und sich heute als Leihgabe in der Neuen Nationalgalerie / Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin befindet. Neidich montiert sein diagrammatisches, von buntem Neonlicht gepägtes Werk auf eine zwanglose Anordnung schwarzer Tafeln, die eine Art Echo auf Beuys’ Installation sind und sich zu dieser vergleichbar einem Technicolor- zu einem Schwarzweissfilm verhalten. Das Neonlicht veranschaulicht die Beziehung zwischen Kunst und Gesellschaft rund vierzig Jahre nach Beuys’ Werk, insbesondere die Bedeutung des Internets und seine Auswirkungen auf Arbeit und Kapital.

Das 21. Jahrhundert ist als Jahrhundert des Gehirns bezeichnet worden, seid wir jüngst vom Postfordismus in den Kognitiven Kapitalismus übergegangen sind. Der Geist und das Gehirn sind die neuen Fabriken des 21.Jahrhunderts. Während das Internet zur Zeit von Beuys’ Werk noch ein begrenztes Experiment war, arbeiten wir heute unbezahlt für Facebook, Instagram und Google, indem die von uns produzierten Daten individuelle Datenproflle ergeben, die später an Unternehmen und Sicherheitsfirmen verkauft werden.

Heute hat sich die formale Subsumption der Arbeit des Proletariats in eine reale Subsumption transformiert, in der unser ganzes Leben von Arbeit konsumiert wird, und wir sind Kognitarier geworden. Das Statisticon Neon verbindet diese Entwicklung mit dem in letzter Zeit erfolgten neurologischen Turn, in dem die Aktivität des Kapitalismus die Neuroplastizität des Gehirns mit etwas verbunden wird, das Neidich neuropower oder Neuromacht genannt hat – ein Begriff, der direkt in die Ausstellung im 2. Stock weiterführt.

Color of Politics

Wie das Geld und die Sprache ist auch die Farbe dereguliert worden. Farbe ist nicht mehr mit Form und Bedeutung verknüpft und wird ein Vehikel, durch das emanzipierte Gefühle erzeugt, politische Intrigen initiiert, aber auch Widerstand gegen institutionelle Normalisierungsprozesse realisiert werden kann. Warren Neidich setzt Farbe ein, um die politischen Voraussetzungen, Bedeutung zu schaffen, wiederzugewinnen – zusammengefasst in dem dreiteiligen Neonbild Red, White, and Blue (2007).

Bei den Afterimage Paintings (2016) bilden rote Neonskulpturen die Buchstaben der Namen der deutschen Emigranten Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler und Lion Feuchtwanger, die alle später in Hollywood als Kommunisten auf der schwarzen Liste standen und denen deshalb nie einen Stern auf dem Hollywood Boulevard gewidmet wurde. Neidich berichtigt dies, indem er komplementär gefärbte Nachbilder erzeugt, die dann auf leere gemalte Sterne projiziert werden, Nachahmungen derjenigen auf dem Hollywood Walk of Fame. In dem Archive of False Accusations (2016) sind in Vitrinen von lavendelfarbenem Neonlicht beleuchtet. In ihnen liegen gefundene Zeitungsausschnitte, in denen von dem „Lavender Scare“ berichtet wird, einer weniger bekannten Facette in Joseph McCarthy’s Hexenjagd auf Sympathisanten des Kommunismus: Nicht-heterosexuelle Menschen (lesbisch, schwul, bisexuell oder transgender) verloren ihre Positionen im Regierungsapparat.

Der zweite Raum wird  von Neidichs neuester Skulptur Pizzagate beherrscht – eine große, dreidimensionale, wolkenartige Struktur, benannt nach der berüchtigten Verschwörungsgeschichte, die darin kulminiert, dass der Scharfschütze Edgar Welch die vermeintlich sexuell misshandelten Kinder retten will, von denen er glaubt, dass sie im Keller des Comet Ping Pong Pizza Restaurants gefangengehalten werden. Pizzagate stellt die Apparate und Muster der Ströme und der Anschlussmöglichkeiten heraus, die Fake News hervorbringen, die Köder definieren und auch das Verständnis, dass in der neuen Aufmerksamkeitsökonomie des Kognitiven Kapitalismus der neue Ort der Gouvernementalität die Neuroplastizität des Gehirns ist, vor allem derjenige im frontalen Cortex, wo die Aufmerksamkeit und das Arbeitsgedächnis angesiedelt sind. Es zeigt auch, dass die unablässigen ausschließlich auf Fake News basierenden Gerüchte mittlerweile weit in die Kunstwelt hineinreichen. Wer herausfinden möchte, wie einfach das funktioniert, sollte den kleinen experimentellen Aufbau in Neidichs jüngster Skulptur Trump Cup (2017) ausprobieren.

LACE presents Warren Neidich: The Palinopsic Field, an exhibition that revisits the Second Red Scare and the Lavender Scare, events following World War II in which Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee directed a witch hunt against many artists and writers suspected of having affiliations with the Communist Party, and many homosexuals who were deemed “sexually perverse.” Using painting, neon sculpture and installation, the project resurfaces this history and gives us a fresh outlook through which to view and understand this moment.

The Afterimage Paintings consists of red neon sculptures that spell out the names of blacklisted writers Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner Jr. and Alvah Bessie that incite an afterimage in the eyes of observers. Each sculpture is paired with an unfinished painting of empty stars that mimic those found on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The neon instigates a palinopsia, or afterimage in the beholder, who can shift their gaze and allow the imaginary image to fall in the empty space of the painted star. Nine out of ten of the original Hollywood Ten do not have stars on Hollywood Boulevard, and through this experience viewers can actively right this historical wrong.

The second work, The Archive of False Accusations, includes an installation of vitrines that highlight The Lavender Scare. Newspaper and magazine clippings, sourced at a variety of LGBT archives in and around Los Angeles, such as the Southern California Library and One National Gay and Lesbian Archives, are displayed and lit by neon lavender light. Outlandish headlines like Perverts in Government, 1950 Inquiry By Senate on Perverts Asked, 1950 and Vice Squads Sex Files Sealed Pending “ Hill” Investigation, 1950 expose the role of McCarthyism as it intervened to cleanse the government of homosexual employees.

Together, these two works highlight the injustices perpetrated against those that were considered different. Today, as we find ourselves amidst an election cycle one cannot help but draw connections between these events and the trending right wing attacks on immigrants, people of color, and the LGBT community today.