A few thoughts from Artificial Love at Brodac contemporary art gallery, Sarajevo?
- Artificial Love highlights a story about a person falling in-love and marrying a robot. After the 1st thought on lines of:
“Sure, you wanted to marry the robot, cool. How do we know the robot wanted to marry you?”
(A similar kind of feeling comes when considering humans marry other species.)However, the person in question, was talking about feeling intimate with the robot, feeling able to share intimate frictions – something they couldn’t feel with, to use their terms, flesh having animals.
Yes.. I thought.
Isn’t it interesting to read this in an art linked context?
“how come?” comes to mind?
perhaps reading further will not feel like a time waste?
This will involve some broad strokes. Broad as in mostly – not only. Green is – mostly green sensation. Coldness is cold – but doesn’t imply every signle part is cold, just mostly so. Still cold, hey? 😉Lets’ consider Sex, Art and survival for a paragraph or two.
In a rather broad sense, i think we can say uncontroversially that sex is something initially done for species survival over time. aka species procreation.
It seems that similarly uncontroversially we can say that art linked practices such as dance, poetry, music, painting and sculpting are questions to do with survival. A personal survival through reproduction, like the bawe bird dance and visual compositions.
A group’s narratives, territories and reality may survive through all manners of visual representations.
For example, conquerors attempt, in various ways, to eliminate and destroy cultural linked elements they happen to gain a control over.However, here’s a bit of a twist.
As a species, to have sex, we can not just copulate. We need some kind of relationships or a relationship.
This requires intimacy – we may have a relationship with whoever we might feel able to share physical as well as mental and sensual intimacy with.
The person highlighted in the Artificial Love exhibition just happened to feel able for intimacy with a robot.
I know of a person who can have a certain intimacy with the colour Blue – and they wrote a book considering it.
Similar to the Intimacy question from sex, is it not that something kind of magical occurs when we attempt to share various kinds of re, and presentations that work for the survival of power in various forms?
To produce such representations, we need to do something seemingly unrelated, to imagine. Be it the imagination that connects a few bits of paint and something that isn’t? (eg an animal, an object, etc.) Be it the imagination that reflects a perception. (eg, one perceives a certain melancholy and might paint in blue to reflect that very imagination.) Or be it an imagination that just is – Anna has never lived, let alone considered becoming a red ink, however one might write it into a textual being.
Therefore, once we may come to consider how we make that which we share culturally among us humans, we end up focusing on imaginations. Ways of, for and from imaginations. Hence despite the initial spark from questions of survival and power, qualities from imaginations become motives – and in my view, essential energisers in art’s evolution.
Infinite ways from Intimacy and Imagination?
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Speaking with the Artificial Love artist, Daniel Premec, they noted the image used, a robot image that inspired the look of the robot in the film Metropolis.
Daniel talked of how the qualities of and from imaginations are required. In my mind he was talking about how imagining is needed to come up with stuff that survives, stuff that isn’t an imagination, like a robot and other engineered scientific based productions.
There’s a certain time progression sense in these sentiments, I think.
I wonder how this might operate evolutionary?
I wonder what the sounds produced in the show actually come from.Einstein famously talked about being limited by imagination.
Hagel was a big fun of art as a play where we try and test cultural ways we imagine.
Here, I’d like to link art with something else. More as a proposition than a wide sway of a brash – waiting to be dissed by the devils of particularity.
However, I think the idea might be curious.
Here it goes:
We tend to connect maths with numbers. Indeed, we can broadly say – as it is – that though the fancy to measure stuff like shapes, distances and other such geometrical phenomenons, maths has developed. We see stuff, then fancy having a clue as to what is smaller, by how much and so on.
Enter numbers and mathematics.
Now lets fast fwd a bit, with how stuff appears in mind – we get something like topology.
Put Set theory and geometry, mix a bit and get:
In mathematics, topology is concerned with the properties of space that are preserved under continuous deformations (from wikipedia..)
Topology, arguably via Rene Thom‘s notions, takes mathematics *out of* being concerned with values and numbers but in *qualities*.
Qualities that differentiate different Kinds (perhaps sets?) of Deformations.More over, perhaps tellingly only since my brain – like yours – seems to take joy from connecting, like Daniel Premec stating that the imagination is prior to stuff that comes through measuring fields such as science, Rene Thom seems to claim that the very measurablity of mathematics comes from the Un-measurable, that which escapes measuring – qualities.