Page 337 - The Black Box Book

tion pipeline was redesigned and traditional artists produced semi-finished Similar to Surveillance Capitalism, contemporary synthetic curating
products to be processed into finished products under the supervision uses the process of Segmentation - Deception - Domination in addition to
and direction of curators. These artworks were then forcibly recontextu- Knowledge - Access - Care to its institutions' seemingly humane faces.
alized in physical or digital spaces and displayed and marketed as new, But, these institutions are living algorithms whose computations (includ-
innovative but mostly harmless, system-preserving and irresponsible art. ing curating) take place predominantly in black boxes. Neither engineers
If machines and institutions are synthetic curators, and existing nor curators or system administrators understand the level of complexity
human curators replace traditional artists, as a consequence, technical involved, unable to grasp that institutions are too complicated for any
systems and institutions automatically become dominant. If all these contemporary digital simulation. This lack of understanding of ML/AI
systems feed on the 'curated' systems or sources, for example, Google technology is astounding and dangerous. It leads to human hubris.
rankings, Wikipedia entries, and Artifacts lists, informational incest be-
comes the new gold (Ether) standard. Abusing contemporary fields of “The Austrians should not think that art consists only of
societal negotiations such as inclusion, diversity and bias and rendering reacting in the moment, but also of creating methods.”
these transformative issues into institutional PR narratives. This is embod- Luc Bondy (another dude)
ied by polishing and streamlining language to intersect while gaslighting
audiences trained in populism and consumerism, incapable of processing We chose to use natural language and identified it as a common
uncomfortable realities. Moreover, facing painful contradictions and reluc- denominator in all algorithmic systems (e.g. Venice Biennale, Liverpool
tance to generate any inconvenience for corporate sponsors. In a world Biennale, dOCUMENTA). When artists discover a love for something
of institutional Newspeak and the use of language as a weapon used by old, the art and its challenge is to create something radically new and
international art institutions, the global elite is effectively killing itself off subversive, not to reconfigure the old. The central aspect of all artistic
by turning everything into a state of deliberate Idiocracy (USA Today: work is intransigence and uncompromising action. Typically, neo-liberal
Nothing hurts a Republican Senator as much as helping people). curators are concerned with opportunistic measures, abusing the needs
of the disadvantaged, exploiting the precariousness and abundance of
human artists, the seemingly worthlessness of algorithms, and the short
life-cycles of machines. Psychologically, the daily fear of getting caught
Figure 4: The Next Biennial Should be Curated by a Machine (2021). up in nettles and being attacked by the exclusive circle of high-end cu-
Commissioned by Whitney Museum of American Art New York and the Liverpool Biennial 2021. rators, or even worse, being ridiculed by their peer-group and becoming
Retrieved from https://whitney.org/exhibitions/the-next-biennial
an outcast, seems to dominate major decisions. Within such harsh and
brutal environments, utilized and appropriated artworks degenerate and
lose their individual and distributed agency. Subjected to the predatory
and self-destructive neo-liberal paradigm, the artwork serves to promote
the curators’ careers, institutional claims to power and financial interests
of corporations, another form of immortal algorithms. Artwork declined
into powerless objects, anti-revolutionary placeholders, resistance fig
leafs, and transactional objects of toxic bartering. This class of curators
schizophrenically rapid cycle between absolute claims to power and weak-
ness and victimization. Initially, influential curators and large institutions
impressed us madly. Our dealings with them turned us on incredibly, in
the most aggressive sense of the word. And now it is time to hand this
aggression back to those who caused it. Curators invented their own
function, took over control and perpetuated the extinction of subtle
functions of the late art system. Incredibly author-fixed and authentic, we
can’t ignore the public personality and branding of the artist dominating
the perception of artworks. Details and facts about authors, but also cura-
tors and institutions, fill contextual gaps with narratives and mythologies.
And we feel compelled to conduct independent experiments in order to
supplement the existing narcissism of human curators by using algorithmic
expansions of action and space for thought and play. But in the sacred
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