Page 92 - The Black Box Book

M O TI F : B L A C K BO X
The title of the online project Black Box, including the New Archivist,
entails many meanings. It refers, for example, to the boxes stored in ve-
hicles that record the course of a flight or journey and serve as a source
of information in reconstructing mostly tragic events in the event of an
accident or disaster. In our case, this meaning is fulfilled by the fact that
the Black Box contains images that capture the experience of the glob-
al pandemic of Covid-19, as reflected by the group of artists based in
the Czech Republic who participated in the project.
However, the black box is also used in sociology, psychology, and
cybernetics to describe systems where the inputs and outputs are known;
still, it is unclear how the outcomes were achieved. Artificial neural net-
works are also often referred to as black boxes because they perform
complex recurrent processes outside the (human-visible) regime. (Berry,
2011, p. 15) Therefore, we consider the involvement of artificial intelligence
in an exhibition project as a curator as another level on which the black
box motif is developed, this time through the chosen medium and tool of
manipulating the box´s contents.
AI AS IN ALIEN INTELLIGENCE
“An image isn’t only a technical reality: to have an image you need
a scene, a myth, the imaginary.” (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 30)
We tell a story with a typical sci-fi plot built on the myth of the cat-
aclysmic end of humanity that features the curatorial intervention of
an artificial intelligence probing into a dataset that consists of visual testi-
monies about the time of the Covid-19 pandemic hidden in our black box.
The story is set in a future in which humanity has lost the battle against
the pandemic of Covid-19. Humans have disappeared, and only traces
of our civilization, represented by the contents of the black box, remain.
This box is searched by a non-human intelligence – the New Archivist or
Alien Intelligence, embodied by an artificial neural network.
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The story is reminiscent of postmodern science fiction known as
cyberpunk which emerged in the second half of the 20 century amid
th
the cybernetic revolution associated with the rapid development of com-
puting, computers, and artificial intelligence. Indeed, at the heart of
the plot of our story is one of the key themes of this science fiction pro-
duction, namely “the question of control versus freedom, as it forces us
to consider the extent we control or are controlled by the technology we
wield” (Telotte, 1995, p. 47)
In the framework of the current stage of development of intelligent
systems, the question of who controls and who is controlled, who is
the subject and who is merely the object of action has assumed particular
urgency. There has been frequent talk recently of the threats associated
with the use of artificial intelligence as a tool of distributed control over
the inhabitants of cyberspace in the form of ‘smart algorithms’ that keep
us trapped in our social bubbles. AI is presented as a severe threat to
people working in a variety of industries, from truck drivers to teachers and
doctors to journalists and graphic designers and many others, because it
could put them out of work soon. And at the same time, the AI industry is
creating new jobs that aren’t talked about much, degrading the usefulness
of human labour to mechanically tagging massive datasets for neural net-
work learning at meagre wages, for example, using workers hired through
a site run by Amazon, aptly named Mechanical Turk. Similarly troubling
are the considerations of experts on the ethics of autonomous vehicles
discussed under the label of the ‘trolley dilemma’ (e.g., Bonnefon, Shariff,
Rahwan, 2019, p. 15), which posit mathematical solutions to situations in
which a ‘smart’ car (currently hypothetical) chooses between killing one
person in the car or five strangers.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the inhumanity of AI reason also
revealed itself substantially. Mapping the global spread of the virus,
the evolution of the disease based on factors such as human migration,
illness and death rates by age, population health and vaccine coverage,
etc. (Kreuzhuber, Mar 19, 2020) But not only that, AI models were also
used to predict the future behaviour of the virus, in addition to processing
and visualizing data on the current state of the pandemic, and therefore
realistically determining the next steps governments, health professionals
and ordinary people could take to combat the viral contagion. Who was
controlled by whom? Were humans maintaining the AI systems supposed
to help them make decisions? Or were the AI systems controlling our next
steps and therefore determining what we would do and how quarantine
measures would be tightened or loosened?
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