Halfway through the de Young’s new exhibit, “Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI,” I found myself staring through a clear pane of glass at a white magnolia tree in bloom outside.
Inside, two video screens mounted on easels faced each other from opposite ends of the room. According to the audio tour, Hito Steyerl’s installation, The City of Broken Windows, took its inspiration from the window I had been looking through. One of the screens showed a workman battering a pane with a hammer. Muted chimes accompanied the crash. Standing in the same place, Steyerl hadn’t seen what I had. Instead of taking in the architecture of the tree blossoms, or the gray light on a foggy morning, she decided to destroy the scene.
The “Uncanny Valley” audio tour, along with the explanatory wall text, hyperinflates the artists’ intentions. Without them, the works just cloak the museumgoer in a variety of digital stratagems. The artists and their curators are less interested in reaching Luddites and other more ordinary civilians. They’re appealing to Silicon Valley technocrats who can also code and adapt buzzwords to sell their products. Otherwise, the rooms display a remarkably cold intersection between art and technology.
In one sense, the exhibit achieves the stated goal: to remind us what it means to be human in the age of AI. There’s a dehumanizing effect that began to weigh me down as I wandered from one gallery to the next. “Uncanny Valley” left me with the same worn-out feeling I get when I’ve been staring at a computer screen for far too long. I could easily identify with the dead-eyed robot which greets viewers at the exhibit entrance.
As I entered the museum, the four screens of Stephanie Dinkins’ Conversations with Bina48 were temporarily silent or stuck in a glitch. When I left, the screens had started up again. Ignoring the dictates of social distancing, a woman stares intently into a female robot’s eyes while they converse. I understood that this was, in part, a reflection of you and your interaction with technology. The dead-eyed thing doesn’t care about our identity. It doesn’t care about anything.
How does all that staring into the abyss affect us? Badly, when the abyss stares back. Trevor Paglen assembles a wall of over 3,000 black-and-white mugshots in They took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead… (SD18). Something called the American National Standards Institute (founded in 1918) has collections of these images that were “used to train early facial-recognition technologieswithout the consent of those pictured.” An online description of what the institute does is chilling and deliberately remote, “a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standardts for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States.”
They took the Faces, like the rest of “Uncanny Valley,” isn’t as evocative without its explanatory note. Without it, the faces suggest that the incarcerated share an enforced anonymity. This is a correct observation but not a new one. However, being told what the artist’s intentions are doesn’t leave room for the viewer to experience the piece as something more complex and multivalent. It becomes one-dimensional and monolithic.
Green lights flood the gallery containing Zach Blas’s The Doors. The artificial setting is meant to evoke a Silicon Valley tech campus. It misses the mark. The objects, which include a cabinet filled with vials of the latest wonder drugs and ferns, are reductive. There are also several monitors showing an animated lizard with cilia swaying on its back like blue flames. It’s meant to represent the dark heart beating inside of the tech giants. What’s missing is the mix of human overreach and fallibility that the new TV series Devs gets right.
What doesn’t appeal to me, thoughinteractions with animated human avatars, finding a virtual bird through a tabletobviously appeals to a multibillion-dollar industry of gamers.
I watched a group of high school students run from one gallery to the next. They simmered down momentarily for Lawrence Lek’s AIDOL, a hybrid anime hero story and music video. But it didn’t capture their attention for long. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to. We all watched the machines flicker for awhile and then we dashed onto the next brightly shining thing.
Uncanny Valley
Thru Oct. 25, $16+
de Young Museum, San Francisco
deyoung.famsf.org
