REVIEW: Adam de Neige, The Machine Was a Ball Ball, and I Was a Cold Star, Spazio Tana, Fondamenta della Tana, Venice, May 10 to June 27, 2017
An ‘unofficial’ Collateral Event of Viva Arte Viva, the 2017 edition of the Venice Biennale, Adam de Neige’s live AI installation, The Machine Was a Ball Ball, and I Was a Cold Star, is located just over the Ponte de la Tana from the Arsenale.
Created in collaboration with software engineer Ivan Pesic and audio engineer Norbert Unfug, the exhibition’s single, darkened room is overgrown with electrical cables connecting a network of computer systems which generate the continuous stream of images and videos projected onto the shard-like screens strewn throughout the room. Prior to its opening, the AI program was used to collect auditory and visual stimuli as initial inputs into a series of intelligent algorithms.
Being adaptive and self-learning, the AI takes its own decisions. Processing, evaluation, learning, cutting and arranging sound, photographs and video projections go on 24/7 during the whole exhibition, [... creating] plots of increasing complexity [and] triggering an uncontrollable change of atmosphere, visual output and narration.
The work may be understood as a digital abstraction of images and film (bringing to mind James Hoff), or, perhaps, as a kind of Duchampian ‘assisted readymade’. de Neige’s withdrawal of control — his “[surrender of] self-expression to the power of data” — and emphasis on process and concept rather than outcome similarly echoes that of Duchamp and conceptual art.
de Neige’s conceptual interest reflects the tenuous nature of individual subjectivity within an increasingly entangled contemporary society.
Today, as happenings in distant parts of the world may strike us every day and have existential impact, nothing and everything becomes important. Information has become an untameable beast. We are trying to distinguish the wrong from the right, not to get lost in the overall dynamics.
It is this difficulty — the difficult in distinguishing “the wrong from the right [without getting] lost in the overall dynamics” — that the work ultimately functions for and upon the viewer. Within the incessant babbling produced by the algorithmic operation of the AI, an occasional poetic alignment appears or is imposed (“oh time thy pyramids”). We are all inquisitors in the Borgesian sense.
Regardless of the works heady technical and conceptual underpinnings, its experience its captivating and always asking of one more minute. Its lack of objective narrative requires of the viewer a self-conscious examination of their own subjectivity in order to find or infer any meaning .