(13:10 – 15:18)

“So I thought that there was an interesting opening that art might be able to address is to make us more aware of how that is changing, how we are going to be embodied as technology was going to get closer and closer to our experiencing of the world. I felt going in, the more typical reaction from the humanities and from the arts was that technology was way out here and we are going to maintain a humanistic world and I thought that was not what was going to happen. The technology was going to be so powerful it was going to change how we actually are in the world and that art could be the area that could begin to initiate our understanding of that change and, given that, I was beginning to find ways to talk about the body that would not necessarily refer to past imaging of the body. With that I began to, instead of looking at art history, examine my own experience in the world. (…) I felt that as soon as you experience pain you got the “real” and as soon as people are suffering thats real and so you can go as far as you want into the artificial, into the future, into the synthetic so if, unless you can get rid of pain completely, you are not going to be able to get rid of the body. So I was faced with a kind of paradox, which is to get into the synthetic, the technological and the artificial but at the same time to bring in the body as well.”

​

(17:00 – 21:09)

“If I am going to do painting and sculpture in the way we think of it, how can I justify that I am talking about technology without being technological, without making films or video? What is important to me is the effect of technology on us. I am not interested in making art with technology as a new medium because I think it is a much more complex situation now, because not only was the world changing, becoming more technological, but what artist can use as mediums was also changing, so it is both of them changing and this comparison, if you go back to early modernism, when painting (lets say in the early days of cubism) was changing, the medium was still staying the same - it was still oil painting so you had a reference point and that you could see the difference in the way the artists were painting gave you the sense of movement. (…) I was concerned more with when you see a video work, or wether you are talking on the telephone, or using your cellphone, what is changing and how we are relating to these new objects. So it is more about going back to the issue of affect, that the landscape that we are working or living in is changing and then I felt more traditional media might be able to address this equally well, if not better perhaps, than actually using a technological medium and thats how I justified continuing in a more painterly mode. (…) There was this paradox that I wanted to recognise the object, that we are not looking into a square, like look into a world in a typical representational painting and you seen an imagined world of the artist, in a way I was taking from the achievements of minimalism, which is that there really is just an object in front of us and I want to recognise that it is an object in front of us (we are not looking at a fantasy world) and thats partly why I came up with these rounded cornered sheets of plywood floating off the wall. At the same time I want to have an illusionary world simultaneously. (…) The pieces seem almost like objects, manufactured, but then you see that there is actually a subjectivity in them (as their illusion of a surface reacts to their corners). When I was doing word processing I realised that there was actually this very illusionistic world that I was moving into. It wasn´t real it was into the screen and so that was closer perhaps to - if you look at even religious painting or something, that´s an imagined world – it´s not necessarily painting something like a glass in front of me and I thought that the virtual world that we are in is in a way a kind of imagined world as well - it is virtual. It is not Surrealism, no, Surrealism comes from dreams. This is real but it´s not real so in a way it´s new. I thought that might somehow be interesting to capture that sense of the real and unreal - the hyperreal (referencing Baudrillard).”

(47:59 – 51:37) 

“I am getting asked about AI a lot nowadays. I don´t know enough about AI to really answer questions about this with a real sense of understanding here. (…) It´s very hard to predict where the world is going to go at this point and I have become aware that to project into the future is very limited because we only know where we are now and that as future generations emerge, they will have a whole different way of seeing themselves in the world and we may say “look what you have lost” but they wont know what they have lost. They are just in a different world. We are already seeing that. Children who were raised with their iPhones now, all the concerns and alarms that educators feel now, they don´t feel them at all, this is just the world they live in and humans are extremely adaptable for better or for worse. So what we see as the end of humanness they say “what´s humanness, we are just in the world, period.” So to make a judgement or an opinion is somewhat limited actually. On the other hand, I do believe that we do have a responsibility in the moment we are to contribute certain values or judgements, that we as a culture have come up, with that we think where this all should go and we do have a certain agency here. (…) It´s not clear to me that singularity is a bad thing. I am amazed at what we can do now just with our iPhones. (talking about the political power that is gained by controlling aspects of this new medium) I think we are now starting to see the dark side. Some people have said that there was always a darkness to [my work] and they didn´t understand where that was coming from and I don´t consider myself a dark person, but I can see it now and I say “well if you wanna know where the darkness is, just look at the world we are in right now. It is very scary what can happen here." (…) The power to manipulate is very frightening. Wether we can contain that power is a huge question.”