CHF Chicago Humanities Festival

Taylor Hokanson is an Assistant Professor of Art at Columbia College Chicago.

Computers are dumb.  Though they have the ability to store, process and export massive amounts of data, they are fundamentally incapable of distilling meaning from this material.  A computer can pretend to offer insight, but one must never forget that this synthesis is illusory, an echo of the human who taught the device how to operate.

Here’s the secret to understanding computing:  at the most fundamental level, digital devices can only differentiate between true and false.  That’s it!  This binary system seems impossibly limiting, yet computers are capable of enormously complex behavior. 

We crossed an important conceptual boundary when computing components  shrank to a size that cannot be perceived by the naked eye.  Although this shift has made powerful technological devices more accessible to individuals of all economic strata, it did so at the cost of another kind of access. For example, before the engineering of an automobile became computer-mediated, any high school kid could learn to fix up and maintain a car.  We had a more physical relationship to technology, or at least the potential for one.

Modern computers, on the other hand, are akin to mystical objects.  We depend on these devices, yet our relationship to them is wholly abstract.   What’s more, the actual components of a computer are useless without software, another complexity that has no tangible state.  Is this phenomenon really any different from Animism, where we worship those objects and events on which we rely and that we do not understand?

Great thinkers have always expressed great concern whenever society develops a new technological dependency. Plato worried that writing would supplant memory[i]. John Phillip Sousa feared that “infernal machines” would replace the human vocal chord[ii]. Leonard E. Read warned that industrialization would create a nation of human cogs that lacked the ability to complete complex tasks individually[iii].  However, in every case, the technologies in question proved too great a temptation and were ultimately adopted.

Contemporary philosophers such as William Gibson and Jason Salavon provide us with the modern equivalent of Plato’s technological musings.  Both men regard digital systems as reflections of essential human traits – most interesting when used (or misused) to address some personal desire.  Gibson, whose medium is fiction, uses the flexibility of print to discuss technology that does not yet exist.  Salavon, a visual artist, composes custom software to produce artwork that employs technology as both material and subject.

Consider, for example, Salavon’s Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized) [iv].  Here the artist produced four prints, each representing the software amalgamation of a full decade of centerfold photography.  Only the title hints at prurient content; all that remains are the ghostly hints of a single figure in each image.

From a technological perspective, centerfolds provide Salavon with a perfect leaping-off point.  The basic proportions of the vertical format are instantly identifiable with the help of the title.  One can also depend upon the regularity of the composition, given the documentary purpose of the original material.  Indeed, Salavon has explored many photographic themes that return near-identical results.  From this perspective, the work is a meta-commentary on the way that familiar image groupings (including graduations, pornography, and snaps with Santa) lose all individual meaning when repeated over and over.

The heavy technological component to Salavon’s work can mask the presence of more traditional conceptual content.  Again, consider the visual progression of Centerfold across the decades.  The lack of identifying characteristics forces a viewer to rely on the broad strokes; namely, the fact that Playboy centerfolds appear to grow thinner and less diverse (read: whiter) over time. 

Similar critique of the objectification of women is often stated in a much more strident fashion.  Salavon, however, is careful to separate himself from the direct invocation of these ideas.  Here he lets software do the heavy lifting, producing work that is simultaneously celebratory and critical.  Much like the Surrealist practice of automatic drawing, Salavon’s algorithmic approach allows him (and us) to discover the hidden content of the popular subconscious.

The Computational Artist: Jason Salavon in Conversation with Hamza Walker

University of Chicago - Kent Chemical Laboratory: Oct. 23, 2:30 PM

Tags: Computers, philosophy, art, Jason Salavon, William Gibson, digital art