Exploring the Biological Biological-like Possibility
My genetic engineering work involved fluorescent microscopy (e.g., the imaging of fluorescently "tagged" proteins in cells). Microscopy reveals the unseen but the image one finds is never free of biases. In the arts, there is often talk of the metaphorical "lens" through which we see the world; in science and math, as opposed to the arts, the "lens" may quite literally be there. When looking down the microscope, the human eye melds with it; the machine, in a very real sense, is bound to the human visual system; and the genetic and learned rules that contribute to perceptual biases are magnified as a result.
The scene one finds when using the microscope is therefore imprisoning in that it may expose human limitations, and yet freeing by acknowledging their existence. Obviously, the microscope’s intent is to reveal the unseen–that there is a specimen and a slide, and the scale is beyond normal, visual capabilities. After all, without the microscope, much more of the natural would remain hidden and unaffected by human insight (preventing the development of drugs, antivirals, and antibiotics). It makes the unseen seen without any controversy. However, the unseen, as I’ve discussed, is also more nuanced and abstract. Does it also mean the unseen inner world of thoughts and ideas and limitations, exposed or magnified by the technology? Maybe this is the discovery. That we may see ourselves clearly and in turn other worlds and possibilities, formerly hidden in plain sight. Whereas we were confused before the technology, affected by what we couldn’t see, its development brings about an awareness to ask the question: What does it mean, What’s next? And this discovery — of a question we wouldn’t otherwise have asked — is the true function of technology (and the microscope, specifically).
Inspired by this, I applied AI modeling to visualize this melding–distorting or obscuring biological imagery, rendering formerly precise cellular features as simply, “biology-like“; then overlaying this on nighttime imagery from cities. There is something unmistakably powerful in a brightly lit cityscape, shrouded as it is in darkness; light pushing through in pinpoints, illuminating the scene. Much like the microscope, the city is revealed at night. It is the concrete fact. And yet it is the millions, working and burning, running through, and toward, and away–and all longing for some thing, or moment, to rise above the fact. Much like microscopy, the amalgam of city and dweller, reveals humanity’s shortcomings in imagery. Yet there also remains something ill defined in the image, calling upon humanity’s insatiable drive toward that one big question: What’s next?
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Self Portrait
The natural world is symbolic. Of the many symbols that define the world few are as significant to human nature as DNA, RNA, protein, language, and mathematics.
Although DNA, RNA, and proteins are fundamentally molecular structures that are comprised of smaller molecular units (nucleotides for DNA and RNA and amino acids for proteins) it is common to use a simplified text-based representation, where each nucleotide or amino acid is assigned a one letter code. For DNA and RNA, this is simple because there are few nucleotides (e.g., DNA: ATCG, RNA: AUCG). A protein, however, consists of 20 standard amino acids, and can be represented using 20 letters (e.g. L: Leucine or K: Lysine, etc.). We might think that this is abstract–a departure from reality. And from one perspective this sounds correct. But the world we know best, that of our perceptual experience, is equally abstract.
Our recognition of “real” or “natural” is always in reference to some set of rules. It is through binning or categorizing experience according to these rules that we get familiar shapes, forms, and patterns. Evolution, however, does not move towards a truly universal, optimal set of rules; it is instead a trajectory characterized as “whatever works”, an effort to make the most of a potentially sub-optimal history. So, we must get into the habit of asking, why these rules? Why is this real? For the artist, on what grounds is an image or work of art literal or representational? For example, a photograph seems obviously literal but this is not the case if we examine it closely. Our experience, then, is elevated to the status of “real” or “natural” only insomuch as we do not question the arbitrary system or rules that make it so. Could there be different rules? Certainly. Therefore, everything is, at some level, highly abstract.
Yet it seems there is a hierarchy. Some things are abstract but they are fundamentally abstract. Namely, there are core building blocks or units that comprise the abstract, human and non-human alike. And this is precisely what we see in text-based representations of DNA, RNA and proteins, but also mathematical symbols such as basic arithmetic and comparison operators (<, >, =, +, *, /).
In life, perhaps we recognize the universals that evolution could not supply directly. We are fragile, limited; however, we are equally universal computers, and can abstractly transcend these limitations simply by thinking and painting–by computing with these core building blocks.
Modifying the words of the poet Walt Whitman, I (or we) contain (and are expressed abstractly by) multitudes. If we look close enough, we can observe among the multitudes, something that is foundational. At this level, though it lacks the clarity we desire and are accustomed to, something familiar can still burn through; so it is in the abstract and seemingly inhuman that “self” or “identity” remains. The fire always burns.
A Fading Dream of the West
In the years following the American Revolution and the founding of the United States, a pioneering spirit pushed a newly free and independent people away from the original Eastern colonies into the vast, unexplored West. This expansion, as the 19th century historian Frederick Jackson Turner observed, was equal parts figurative or perceptual expansion and literal or geographic. Freedom and liberty are ideas–words in need of definitions. For the new nation, however, the definitions were not well defined. In the formative years, the identity, not only of these words, but the country became tied to its land and symbolism of a far off place where dreams are lived. If anyone reached the end of a dream, a new land and a new dream was always on the horizon. Freedom and liberty, in other words, could be built from the endless running. Now, as the formerly wild lands are tamed, what is the fate of the pioneer; to what place or in what tasks do a people direct their hopes and fears? What does it mean to be in these United States? Where is our new frontier? Where does the fire still burn?
These are the questions that directed my thinking and my desire to capture this sentiment in minimalist imagery and a nostalgia for the “classic” and “dated.” Immediately, I was drawn to classic Westerns, which in no way represent a simpler time, but it is far easier to rewrite the past than it is to imagine an indeterminate future. And it is in this precarious position that not just the United States, but the entire world, finds itself. Yet the minimalist, American Southwest, with its mesas and far reaching desert plains, brings a unique beauty. For those looking close enough, signs of hope abound. I was looking to capture this tension between the dream of the past and a dream of a future that is not yet written.
A Dream Reimagined
The past exists in all things regardless of our efforts to change. We can’t escape the beauty nor the peril. Taking all things as they are and must be, and allowing our “better angles” to prevail, we can, however, take control of the symbols of the past–making them our own. A dream reimagined.
From Atom to human
It is 1915, a world steadily at war; humanity, self-reflective and unsettled without historical parallels. The physicist, Albert Einstein, in 1907 had introduced the Special Theory of Relativity; the General Theory would follow in 1915; in the year prior, the world witnessed a series of calamities upending fragile treaties and initiating the first global war, World War I. This, among other discoveries emerging from early to mid 20th century would forever entangle science with the political and economic aspirations of countries. Among the witnesses of and participants in World War I is a young French soldier, later scientist and controversial theologian, named, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard, undoubtedly aware of discoveries in physics, and attempting to reassemble the fragments of a broken world, reflected in a post-war diary entry, “…the war was a meeting … with the Absolute.” It was from this position, the world seemingly without mystery and reduced to bare facts, that he saw through progressive reductions in scale, object into atom into mathematics, a vital, creative energy permeating the natural world. And the “Absolute” became dynamic, evolving, for him. As such, the atrocities that lay the world war-like and bare are not afforded the last word. The story may be met with periodic endings, though, giving rise to beginnings. Teilhard felt that this wasn’t cyclic, mere invention and reinvention, but progressive, teleological or purpose-driven, a view that is consistent with valid interpretations of modern findings in neuroscience and physics. On a purely conceptual level, however, it is not difficult to recognize this progression–that a non-living process created life and eventually humans that wonder about their origins, telling stories of earth and star stuff, and drawing their image in constellations in the night sky.
I began to incorporate these ideas into AI-based artwork, seeing the dialogue between machine and human as the inevitable progression of art, in line with Teilhard’s view of the “Omega Point.” I wanted to capture the idea that form, such as the recognizable features of the human body, is transient, and yet identity is not lost here if it is seen as the process and energy that create the form. So, the seemingly non-human is in a way undeniably human and life-like
The Light of Many Suns
Since the earliest evidence of civilization, human life, as well as life in general, has been measured by the light at sunrise and sunset, and although for two observers these may be seen later or earlier, beyond the variability of time and place, race and identity, and the light of seemingly many different suns to different people, it is the light of a single, lonely star. And through the hopes and fears of humanity, all take part and share in the burden of that isolation.
Now, there is something about an image that captures this fully. It expressed a powerful metaphor, especially the light-dark contrast in black and white imagery. For example, a picture is of something real (or seemingly so); the hesitation here — that a picture is indeed real — is that the world obviously continues, time pushes on, and moments are lost before they are ever captured on film or disks. The meaning, then, much like our lives, is not found in a single image, nor is it expressed fully in any one person or sunset or sunrise; rather, it’s only in abstract, in aggregate, that things begin to make sense, whether dealing with the cosmological or ordinary, daily life. We get an interesting interplay when working with digital imagery as a result. Symbolically, an image expresses isolation and loneliness but that same image implies a broader category (many images, types and depictions), and so what we see is that outside of our narrow, biased perspectives it would appear as though contradiction happily coexists. Is a difference actually a difference? Is anyone or anything truly isolated? Zoom out; the big picture becomes clear when the world is seen from different vantage points.
behold the city
In the past, humans would travel to high peaks and in sacred incantations implore a spirit world that was presumably closer at altitude than on the ground. Modern society has since shed itself of such ideas but cannot escape its ancestral origins, and still spiritualizes and ritualizes, and constructs sanctuaries from whatever is convincingly not “primitive.” Now, humanity plays creator and destroyer of worlds, climbing to altitudes at city fringes–offering up, in its sacred words, prayers that, if no longer directed at the supernatural or other worldly, find their destination in no less strange lands; the ragged and depraved streets, of countless, restless travelers. Behold, the city. This is our undoing. This is our saving.
These were my thoughts when developing this collection, inspired by observations of city life, and the unusual convergence of tourists and residents. Whereas the residents are fully aware of the city, the tourists project a wholly different reality. And for a time, the residents can escape into the show, borrowing the invented realities, so that strangely some magic remains even as all have left and the realities of a fallen world return.
Evolving Mind
Ancient cave drawings are a distinct moment in evolutionary history in which nature conferred upon humans the role of artist and storyteller. Initially, this was self-reflective—an act of transforming nature’s uncertainties into the narrative, and therefore controllable, flow of shadowy figures on rock surfaces. As time advanced humans would increasingly retreat into the safety of these “controlled” worlds, never fully grasping their role as nature’s storyteller and to an extent, abandoning the task altogether.
We may however examine the ancient cave art today, to see ourselves in that creative moment. But this time recognizing that we were never solely drawing discernable forms or narratives. So too were we drawing the tangled web of neurons that comprise the brain, deeply connecting ourselves to the natural world. Not the fantasy worlds of our own design.
Unorthodox Spirituality
A recent, although false narrative, is the conflict between science and religion; the imagery tied to the two can be seen as a stand-in for the conflict, as they are apparently different in appearance–epitomizing what Stephen Jay Gould referred to as non-overlapping magisteria (or NOMA), suggesting humanity’s religious and spiritual passions remain distinct from those of science. Historically, however, religious or spiritual thinking was rational, logical inquiry, undifferentiated from science, successively becoming refined and finally institutionalized—moving through natural philosophy and alchemy, and on to physics and chemistry, among other sciences. To the modern perspective, this sequence appears like an incremental shedding of religious and spiritual sentiment; however, this is simply perspective–interpretation changes but nothing ever goes away. The human brain can only build from or off of some starting point. That starting point was religious, supernatural, and spiritual. Accordingly, any substantive dialogue, across all walks of life, is just an expression of this ancient tradition. We can never escape it.
Yet again when thinking about science and religion it is hard not to see significant divisions. Where does this originate? It’s likely that much of this stems from more modern history, the 13th-18th centuries; the founding of the institutionalized church, which defined religion and spirituality, largely according to political interests. This codification created a new religious language that transformed the ineffable into a mathematical or logical framework. If there is a language around something, it becomes sensible in a desirable, communicable way, which is especially desirable for civics/politics. But it is limiting, since a religious language creates sensibility precisely because it is Language and is therefore tied to and inevitably runs against a scientific perspective and its language. There is a risk, in other words, of analyzing the religious language (and not what it is referring to or “pointing” to) as if it were a mathematical proof. The mistake here is that religion, or what it points to, is far more primordial, abstract and ephemeral than this language suggests, and the supporting institutions that have developed over time, far from being vehicles to truth, may have simply built this language up in an effort to invent cognitive “spaces” in which one may fulfil the desire for reason and structure (religious practices) amid fundamental mystery/uncertainty. But this equally applies to science and scientific language as well as scientific practices (experimentation), which can be very ritualistic for the scientist; as such, formal, modern day scientific institutions have a lot in common with their religious counterparts.
Though science and religion may share a psychological or sociological likeness, as far as their institutions and their effects are concerned, there is a far deeper likeness at play, hidden beneath or behind that brings us back to the ancient tradition. Both are chasing a common system of symbolic expression, one that is communicated by nature and artistically rendered or interpreted by the human brain throughout history. Now, this delicate balance has been shattered by language, logic, and institutions, and may seem absent to modern society, but imagery has the power to disarm these artificial structures that we’ve built (For example, what am I looking at in an image?). Namely, imagery characterizing the religious perspective can always, if only abstractly, be aligned to imagery that characterizes the scientific perspective–freeing us, if only briefly, from the non-existent borders and misconceptions.
For this work, I used electron microscopy and cell division imagery, blending them with an amalgam of or abstraction from byzantine-style icons, so as to lessen discernible identity, while preserving the idea of the historical “divine.” Here, the intention of the art is to suggest the “divine,” when viewed generally, is a complex and challenging idea—permeating the world, “bubbling up” in the unexpected and seemingly ordinary.