Human Scale: AiR VII at AOTM

Humanity is central throughout, yet rather than succumbing to a sense of anxious malaise (even as dystopian technofantasies pervade the Zeigeist), the works offer neither an indictment nor a celebration of the status quo. Instead, they become inquiring, empathetic, and occasionally lampooning witnesses to it. They take the amorphous cloud of our digital existences and reduce it to human scale, attempting to form some better understanding of that which can otherwise feel overwhelmingly perplexing.

Aesthetically divergent but thematically linked, these collections are all rooted in a sort of IRL: which is to say, they are born from real life, in real time, insofar as our “real lives” are facilitated by screens. Each of the artists’ source material is plucked from specific, individual experience, and is expanded upon, narrated, reshaped into something universally relatable. The “human touch” is also thoroughly present in all of the artists’ processes, an interesting counterpoint, perhaps, to the so-called erasure of the defined, human individual in an increasingly homogenous digital world. Together, these works breach the scrim of our screens, which both separate and connect us, to each other and to ourselves.

Ivona Tau

Ivona Tau’s 11:05 project expands upon her longstanding interest in AI and the archive. In previous projects, her own family photographs become the focus (the training material) for self-trained models that produce imagined memories of past generations confronting a complex Eastern European historical narrative, sometimes with Tau herself ahistorically inserted into the scene.

11:05 is similarly preoccupied with time, but here time is cast as a fixed, contemporary point of reference rather than a fluid, historical one. The three artworks are each derived from a different experience of “11:05 a.m. yesterday.” The first two works (1/1s) – ‘11:05 Social Network I’ and ‘11:05 Social Network II’ are crowdsourced from Tau’s own community, based on responses to her question of what people were doing at precisely that moment. The third (open edition) – ‘11:05 Social Network World Feed’ – turns outward to news outlets, asking what was happening at that same moment somewhere in the world. The fourth work for the AOTM collection poses the same question through an anonymous form, gathering anonymous responses.

These three streams of material are layered onto AI-generated videos produced with a model trained on Ivona’s own social-media footage, recorded at 11:05 a.m. across various vacations over the past year: time-based clips that recall the pleasure-seeking, aspirational content of influencers, whose collective contributions to “reality” – as expressed through social media – have developed a whole new sphere of simulacra and simulation.

The resultant works possess the smooth-brained gloss of familiar, algorithmically served AI slop, yet emerge from Ivona’s highly particular mixture of materials and an intricate, almost alchemical process of aggregation and combination, prompting, discarding, and retaining. The cognitive dissonance between output and input, surface and substrate, humorously and poetically jolts us into reconsidering the idea of “collective experience” across different scales: the community, the world at large, and the anonymous crowd. These strata of human existence reveal an intertwined network of relatability on the one hand and depersonalization on the other, different ways of experiencing the same moment that become simultaneously intimate, interchangeable, and remote. Like in Tau’s previous work, the “snapshot” – born from analog photography, now recast in the digital age – here is fallible, wavering; a distinctly indecisive moment, and thus all the more worth looking at. 

MARIAH

Mariah uses the whimsical humor of comic book illustration to shed light on dark subjects. In previous projects, she has employed this aesthetic strategy to tackle the intense, fraught history of the Balkans in the postwar period. With her Scammers series, she sets her sights on another sort of war, one in which we are all potential victims, always just a click away from the front lines.

In her experience as a digital artist and known online persona, she regularly receives messages from alleged fans or would-be patrons, attempts to engage her in some sort of online banter, bring down her guard, and eventually coax her into a single wrong move, draining her of funds (and self-trust). For this project, she collected these messages, and even entertained some conversations, fascinated by the dynamic of two disembodied beings (each but a pithy collection of handles, profiles pictures, and text boxes) participating in such an inauthentic, faithless exchange.

The three works created for AOTM are inspired by this experience and seek to illuminate the dark forces behind these exchanges. ‘Hey bro I love your art’ (1/1) allows us to look past the screen and the DMs, to confront the would-be perpetrator head-on, to see his fingers as they type the innocuous and nefarious opener. ‘Let’s follow each other’ (1/1) puts us in the driver’s seat. Here, we occupy his space from his perspective, a unique vantage point that allows us to consider the environment around him. Personal artifacts abound, many of which we, too, surround ourselves with in our home offices. Family pictures, energy drink cans, the endless plume of a cigarette, a clock: a modern-day still life of the mundane and the mortal, objects that place us in the now, while inevitably recalling the transience of the everyday. ‘I wanna buy your art’ (open edition) is a bird’s-eye view showing our anti-hero in a vulnerable, abject, and wholly human, state.

Created for and within a natively digital context, these works are born from an analog process: Mariah draws each frame by hand using graphite, colored pencils, and pastels on paper, aggregating them into animations in digital post-production. The final works are thus physical documents of the artist’s own laborious process, creating a parallel with the invisible labor and humanity of the scammers they depict. Through empathy and humor, Mariah transforms her subjects from villainous unseen forces into anti-heroic cogs stuck in the absurdly infinite loop of late capitalism.

DESULTOR

Last but not least, Desultor approaches the digital landscape through a tragicomic allegory and archetype. An artist whose previous projects offer satirical views of the absurdities and niche obsessions of our beloved crypto space, his works for AOTM expand upon this approach, resulting in three carnivalesque parables of our meme-loving, risk-loving world that cheekily celebrate its foibles and follies.

In ‘illusions of immutability’ (1/1), a parched skeleton kneels on a seashore strewn with the symbolic detritus of past bull cycles: coins, Pepe, “fomo juice,” a Ledger wallet. Once emblems of potential and success, now artifacts lost to the sands of time (illusions indeed). Our hero hoists a mound of sand up to the sky, its grains falling from bony fists, recalling the inevitable passing of time since the halcyon early days, and the Sisyphean task of keeping faith (and liquidity) in our uncertain times. The Neo-Gothic sky twitches along with the skeleton – scrappy animated frames speaking to the circus-like precarity of our collective conditions.

‘front-row shakeout’ (1/1) amplifies the carnivalesque themes. A motley crew of crypto characters – Pepe and our heroic skeleton (again), a grinning devil and its compatriot, sneakily disguised as Pepe, and in the back, a faceless hoodie (a very grim reaper) – are being bounced around on what appears to be a death-defying roller coaster, part joy ride, part hellscape. Their frenetic bops are accompanied by flying coins: as our subjects are rattled around by the highs and lows of the charts, so their coins follow. High risk, high reward, they said – with emphasis on the risk.

Finally, ‘the floor is lava’ (open edition) sees our cast of characters struggling to survive a sea of liquid fire. The bottom is giving out, “the floor” is certain death. Pepe clutches a Nakamoto card, holding on for dear life, while our skeletal hero’s head barely bobs above water. The duplicitous devil is sitting pretty with Roboto in a rowboat, our reaper is in the back, looking up on the scene from a tattered ship (recalling perhaps XCOPY’s prophetic vision of our underworld, All Time High in the City). Do we hold? Do we fold? Do we do it for the culture?

The ideological confusion of this space – we espouse community, and “every man for himself”; we value Art, and ruthless speculation  – finds a parallel in Desultor’s own process, which is unabashedly digital, and often networked and longform,  and also scrappily singular, hand-made, its constituent parts born from the physical world. The contradiction feels fitting: beneath the memes, markets, and endlessly circulating images remains the hand of an individual artist, trying to make sense of, to make something from, the absurdity of it all.