NOTIONS FOR THOUGHT: OBJKTION!
‘OBJKTion!’ at Mono8 is a prelude of sorts to Art Fair Philippines’ current pivot to NFTs and digital art.
NFTs have taken art markets by storm in 2021, even hailed as the future of art, which I personally take with a grain of salt. Considering the economy at present, it’s the gnarled mechanisms of capitalism that dictate which survives and which doesn’t, and the momentum of investors and collectors diving into the world of cryptocurrency isn’t slowing down. Even Christie’s is in on NFTs.
In counterpoint to the fanfare, artists and intellectuals have pointed out issues of NFTs’ environmental impact, ethical quandaries and piracy issues, and that’s merely the tip of the iceberg. Aware of these surrounding conversations, Mono8 presents a prelude to Art Fair Philippines 2021 titled “OBJKTion!: Alternative #CleanNFT Exhibition,” which operates on the open-source Tezos blockchain, whose “annual energy consumption is said to be one to ten million lower than other blockchains.” The show, curated by Gwen Bautista, features Adi dela Zufall, Apol Sta. Maria, Bjorn Callega, Geremy Samala, Jon Deniega, Mac Arboleda, Manuel Arabit, Marlon Hacla, Mirjam Dalire and Patrick L. Jamora.
While I’ve personally met artists who have been practicing cryptoart as early as 2017, bringing practitioners together under one show brings up curious and fascinating resonances about the throttled speed and low resolutions of the Filipino internet, and exploring kinetics and movement that can only be executed as moving images.
Geremy Samalas playfully modifies his paintings as .gifs, which have become a form of online communication almost as ubiquitous as emojis. Calleja manually created animations out of paintings, while Sta. Maria also did a short hand-drawn animation of a film reel slowing down at the moment where the illusion of the film as moving image is shattered, and technology reveals itself. Arabit created animated pixelated portraits of famous figures such as Mao Tse Tung and the lady from Kung-Fu Hustle, which, I realize, are immediately recognizable to the human eye but would escape AI.
Marlon Hacla, Adi dela Zufall and Mirjam Dalire employed General Adversarial Networks, or GAN, which, in a nutshell, trains Artificial Intelligence to be its own devil’s advocate, training itself to succeed itself. Adi dela Zufall’s “Skyscrapers - Memoreverse” seems to feature one Caucasian face backed by a shifting urban landscape. Meanwhile, Hacla and Dalire both used GAN on the paintings of Amorsolo, to markedly differing results. Dalire and Hacla also collaborated on “Mariposa,” resulting in a portrait of a disfigured face on an interactive 3D-rendered canvas, while Hacla’s “Amorsolo Dream No. 1” was a clip of rice fields psychedelically morphing into seascapes and hazy portraits of Mestizas.
For AI-generated images to finally traverse the uncanny valley, they are often fed data by the terabytes farmed from the internet. Perhaps not even Amorsolo’s prolific body of work is enough to train an AI to paint like him. I wonder what meanings AI would make out of other artists who have been considered emblematic of Filipino art. The GAN is just as integral to the art as is the resulting image.
Mac Andre Arboleda’s works also appropriate images and memes (particularly of the Tumblr era), posing questions about the notion of “originality” in digital landscapes, which has certainly extended to NFTs in which a certain ownership is bestowed on a collector even if the work can still certainly be replicated endlessly online.
Patrick Jamora’s images integrate his personal images with public domain historical archives. The flashcard series “My First Hiligaynon Verbs” features collaged images of Caucasians, while his “Tagpian” series features Filipinos. It recalls how the default images in search engines are that of the West, while that which is Filipino surfaces by virtue of being identified as such.
Meanwhile, Jon Deniega’s “Cyphkid” and “Human Algorithm” are seemingly devoid of racial identification, yet in the context of the exhibition these expose the fallacy that the internet and technology are neutral. To me, it’s no longer a matter of whether technology or AI will parallel the capabilities of humans and even take up labor for us, leaving us to our personal pursuits; it’s a question of the neutrality of technology. It is still shaped by human minds, and will never escape the biases of the designer.
All in all, the exhibition presents a nuanced springboard for dialogue surrounding NFTs and their implications, specifically in the Philippines. The conversations at large should also consider, on top of environmental concerns and intellectual property, whether this will provide stability and a livelihood for the artists themselves. But that is not the only burden of any exhibition alone; it is proved by what happens after as the works circulate in the market.
There remains, indeed, a certain human desire underlying Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” that endures to the present. In designing systems, whether in art, technology, or other fields, it’s important to remember who and what these systems are for, to ground us in imagining futures.