Salon 18 // Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid & Uli Ap

Oh. All right, everyone. Hello, hello, and welcome to the 18th Techspressionism virtual salon here on May 25th, 2021. I am Davo, also known as, wow, I did that backwards. My bad. My name is Devante, first of all, aka Davo. I've been the moderator for the salons for the past couple of months now, starting all the way back in around like December. So I'm an artist like many of you individuals here as well. And joining me today is also Colin, our founder of the movement, who's going to say a couple words after I'm done here. But a little bit of a rundown before we get started. We have two presenters today.

Davonte Bradley

We have DJ Spooky, Paul Miller, who is a founder of the movement, and I'm a founder of the movement. And he is a wonderful, wonderful audio artist. Sorry. He's a composer, multimedia artist, and a writer whose work immerses audiences in a blend of genres, global culture, environmental and social issues, and has actually collaborated with an array of recording artists, including Metallica, Chuck D, Steve Reich, and Yoko Ono. His writing has been published by the Village Voice, The Source, Art Forum, and he was the first founding executive editor of the Origin Magazine.

Davonte Bradley

And then our other artist is Uli Ap, hailing out of the UK. She is a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art, science and technology. She explores a cross reality zone between virtual, physical and mental spaces, emerging art, science and technology, architecture and journalism. She creates disruptive performances, intellectually provocative, and bodily disorienting situations and systems within which each of your perceptions are challenged.

Davonte Bradley

Yeah, sounds like a fun time, right? That's being said, I'm going to hand off the mic to Colin, who's going to speak a little bit about the movement for those of you who might not be familiar or too familiar with what we're about. Out. All right. Thanks, Davo. Can you guys hear me okay? Cool. So yeah, I mean, you know, usually it's just kind of like the kind of regulars that show up, you know, every salon, which we meet every two weeks on Zoom here. And it's kind of, you know, inspired by the artist salons of the past where a bunch of artists would get together. Or at each other's studios to kind of talk about ideas and culture. And here we are online, zooming in from all corners of the earth. And it's pretty cool. So I figured Dabo actually came up with the idea that maybe I should give a quick intro just about Techspressionism because we have a bunch of folks here who are kind of like coming in as first-time visitors.

Davonte Bradley

And so basically, Techspressionism, we define it as an artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience. And that definition was formulated the first time we met our very first salon and with the assistance of Helen Harrison, who is the director of the Pollock-Krasner House in the United States. She's a real scholar on expressionism.

Davonte Bradley

And she sort of has been very supportive of this endeavor, which is what I would consider an outgrowth of expressionism and the kind of the philosophical underpinnings of expressionism within a technology-oriented context. So, you know, I came up with this term Techspressionism back about 10 years ago as a title for a solo exhibition. And just last August, we launched as a, you know, as kind of an artist group online using a hashtag strategy on Instagram to locate and source, you know, artists interested in what we're doing. And as of now, we have just about shy of 18,000 posts on Instagram, artists all over the place using the hashtag, you know, on their art posts. And we started up an artist index on Techspressionism.com back in October 2020. The first artist that we added was a guy named Mark Pechlivanos, who's out in, you know, Ohio.

Davonte Bradley

And as of today, we have 244 artists in our index from 35 different countries. And, you know, we meet up on this Zoom salon every two weeks. And yeah, you know, currently on the site, on Techspressionism.com, we have a site, a show called NFT Now, which was curated by Anne Spalter. And it was recently selected by Artnet News as an editor's pick during Freeze Week by a senior editor by the name of Sarah Cascone.

Davonte Bradley

And we're sort of in the planning stages for a couple other shows. My colleague from grad school, Patrick Lichty and I, are curating a show that's going to be an online exhibition, a survey that's going to be 100 artists from all over the world presented via Kunstmatrix, which is a German VR platform, a 3D sort of exhibition platform that we use for NFT Now. That's going to open up in conjunction with the Rong Biennial in November. And then Paul and I met this morning, actually, with the folks over at the Southampton Arts Center in preparation for our first physical exhibition to be called Techspressionism Digital and Beyond. That's going to open in Southampton, New York, at Southampton Arts Center in April 2022. So that's kind of like where we're at. And, you know, I'm going to pass the mic back to Davo and looking forward to a great salon.

Davonte Bradley

Thanks, guys. All right. Thank you so much, Colin. And thank you, everyone, for being here. This would not be happening if it wasn't for all of you. So I got to throw props out where they're deserved. Okay. So let's get this started. General format is that the presenters will do their presentations and then afterwards there'll be a quick, well, not quick, but a Q&A session following that presentation. I ask you guys to keep yourselves muted during the duration of said presentations.

Davonte Bradley

For the discussion period after, you can pose your questions in the chat or please do raise your hand using Zoom's functionality if you are familiar with that. Otherwise, we will not know how to get to you to answer your questions. So that being said, Paul, you have the floor. Go ahead, DJ Spooky.

Yeah. First and foremost, I just want to say hello to everyone. I see a couple of friends in the audience, folks haven't seen in a while. Joseph Nechvatal. Joseph Hayes. Joseph Hayes. And Steve Miller, his new friend. All sorts of folks who are doing interesting stuff. So let's just jump in. There's a lot of material to cover. So I'm just going to give you guys kind of an abbreviated clip notes of some of the issues that I'm kind of dealing with.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

So first and foremost, I want to say that I'm a big fan of this idea of how can we sort of re- the whole idea of DJ culture is about collage and sort of the language. And that's kind of the logic of cut and paste. You think about collage in a kind of very specific Western logic of traditional people. Like some of my all-time favorite artists are like John Hartfeld, who was a political artist during the Weimar Republic in Germany. There's obviously, I mean, collage is a huge medium. There's all sorts of people. But from the viewpoint of urban youth culture, hip hop, techno, dubstep, you name it, the collage takes place in generally what people call a digital audio workstation, DAW. From my perspective, this notion of like an interdisciplinary approach to how we look at art, how we think about science, and above all, the lexicon of assumptions that we have about the role of culture and sort of framing our expectations of the world around us.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

There's no question about it right now. We're in a crisis, not only about the climate, but to me at least, the pandemic has exposed some of the deep structural inequalities that are going on economically speaking. If you think about the notion of capital gains. If you think about the notion of people not being paid a living wage, for example. All of those things are highly aggravated by the pandemic situation. But on top of that, we have social media and the sort of pivotal role it played in the last election. And above all, the pivotal role it's changing in how society thinks about public versus personal space.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Now, DJ culture is kind of my platform. But on the other end of the spectrum, I started out as a writer, artist, and musician. And I think that's a really important part of what I do. I'm three things. Writer, artist, and musician. I always have to kind of really pound that into people because people generally have this sort of, for lack of a better word, sort of lazy thinking where they are like, he's a DJ, he's doing this, he's playing beats at a club. I do all sorts of stuff. So I'm going to kind of give you guys some bullet points and then we'll dive in. But before we even start showing images, I just want to give you guys a conceptual framework from the viewpoint of here we are in 2021.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

We're regrouping after a pandemic where certain pivotal technologies. Say, for example, internet. MRNA vaccines, which stands for messenger RNA that actually deals with all sorts of issues around genetic access to the human, the way the genome responds to viruses, for example, at a mass level that have never been wildly dreamed of before. Even the notion of vaccines themselves. These are all technologies that we've distributed throughout society in a huge way in a macro level very rapidly. So too with ideas. And so to me at least we're not in the middle of a physical pandemic. That's one component. We're also in the middle of a mental pandemic. And to me at least the rise of misinformation and what you call computational propaganda, the QAnon and Trump, you know, sort of know nothings, that sort of demographic.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

In another era they might have been the Nazis. In another era they might have been, you know, a warring tribe that happened to use a different approach to their strategic sense of warfare. So I think that's a good point. You name it. But here we are stuck in these notions of democracy that's based on a very relevant notion of how we think about being a stakeholder in society.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Music is generally a reflection, a mirror that you hold up to society. And to me at least the mirror of things like jazz, for example, a lot of people say jazz was a soundtrack to democracy. You have all these different people playing motifs and notes and elements. Whereas a more cybernetic based culture, a data driven society, that we have today. But now the soundtrack is techno, hip hop, dubstep. These sort of quantified rhythms that come out of these sort of distributed networks of our continuous present digital mirror that we hold up to the world around us. So that soundtrack is based on, you know, the idea of pattern recognition.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

And to me at least how we look at the arts, especially these more interdisciplinary and intangible arts of digital media that are deeply powerful. Tools is that they are based on pattern recognition and the idea of sort of data analytics as the foundation of culture. So one could argue here we are in this sort of Brady Bunch kind of screen here with these little rectangles describing culture in the year 2021. And many people have been facing what they call Zoom fatigue, for example. But that idea of social space stretched and morphed into zeros and ones and all recognition. Mainly because of the fact that we're all in this together. Because of our biological response to a pandemic. Because of the destruction of ions, the displacement of natural orders of creatures in the different ecosystems.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

And bats, you name it. Creatures are living in a disrupted life cycle. And of course everything is connected. Nature is not separate from us. That's kind of a central premise of my work. How we think about the human subject in an era where these digital coercive technologies have radically disinterred our sense of body. And the way the body orients us. And the way we think about ourselves in space.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

So with that said and done. Let's dive in. So we're in the project called digital fictions. And much of my work right now is an interrogation of how we think about the tools of the past to help us rethink the idea of the future. And when I say rethink the idea of the future, the future is always never what it was. And I use that term. I use that as a pun here. Because we have to rethink the notion of linear time. Especially with digital media. Because it's a nonlinear approach to composition. And composition, like I was saying earlier, for me at least, is kind of an inherent critique of whatever society it comes from. So for example, Bach and the Goldberg variations and the Renaissance. There's a great book called Goldil Escher Bach.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Douglas Hofstetter. It's a great book. If you haven't read it, highly recommended. And then on the other end of the spectrum, how we think about this notion of cut and paste culture in a world of loops. How we think about loops holding together the fabric of society right now. That's the role of the DJ. It's sort of it's kind of like a kind of a how should I put it? The current project that I'm working on, like I said, it's a book called digital fictions.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

And I just want to show you that really quickly. I'm fascinated with this idea of the illegible surface. And how, when I say illegible, we might think that we can read this, but we can't. The sheer volume of information in just this small little rectangular space held together by three squares with all the smaller elements in there. If you hold your phone up to it, you will get an entirely different premise.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

And I'm a big fan of this kind of issue. Because these are new forms of literacy. And when we start to think about QR code and other kinds of issues. That we have to kind of rethink the notion of legibility. By the way, I've disabled it because the book's not done. So it'll be in the future. This is the cover of the book.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

So let's go back to the past, like we were saying before. All right. In a certain time period, one could argue the ninth century and seventh century, there was a typical kind of moment in history where. The West. Had actually radically divorced itself from the idea of progress. It was, you know, AKA the dark ages. And what was going on at that time was that.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Muslim culture had moved farther ahead than the West in many areas of both science. The idea of inquisitive, inquisitive and replicable results in an experiment. Everything from surgery went over to the invention of algebra. So there's a very famous moment recently where a right wing lunatic Trump supporter.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Said, what if people of color ever contributed to our current. Society. And I have to laugh, you know, the concept of zero, for example, the numbers one, two, three, four. I know it's hard for Republicans to count, but those numbers are based on Arabic terms. And so they, the West didn't have the concept of zero. Until Fibonacci bought it over from the Arabs. So there was a gentleman named.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

And the European. The. European. Couldn't pronounce his name. But he wrote a book in the ninth century and Baghdad. That became the foundations for modern sense of algebra. So that's the Europeans couldn't pronounce his name. So Al-Quraymi became Al-Zerba. And you know, and so on and so on. But his other nickname is called algorithms. He was generally considered to be the inventor of the term of algorithmic portraiture or algorithmics.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

But he said that he thought it was very useful and very useful in terms of understanding the importance of algorithmic approaches to mathematics. The Roman's and Greeks didn't have zero. So amusingly enough, if you look at their architecture, if you look at their painting and sculpture. It wasn't until the Renaissance that the West came with you call zero point perspective. The idea of putting more and more dimensionality into a work. And you saw radical transformation of Western European painting and sculpture and so on. After they appropriated these mathematical constructs from so from the mathematical further back to Sanskrit and easily see the concept of zero was a Hindu concept the Arabs appropriated it from the Sanskrit and flipped it over into Arabic and preserve quite a bit of knowledge during the middle ages and the dark ages in Europe and so on and so on actually in the Jewish culture as well the Jews and Arabs were far more involved with these notions of mathematics than Europe at that time so in my book I kind of delineate how digital culture comes out of these collisions of culture and in fact the Pope at the time banned the concept of zero and you weren't on pain of being excommunicated or burned at the stake by the way so you know that's what Popes used to do well fast forward a couple hundred years religious persecution and all sorts of other then flipped into other areas there was a place that was destroyed by war but at the time it was where some of the world's premier philosophers scholars and so on gathered to debate concepts in math and philosophy they had surgery they had all sorts of really interesting stuff going on that the west did not urban planning and design for example innovations in architecture now if you sort of think about that relationship to things like Buckminster Fuller and by the way I'm just using this as a preface to my work because I still haven't even shown you guys what I do but I want to give you a little bit of a preface says you never change things by Computastics so too was science we have to rethink some of these kind of issues in the arts because people are still based on the they're addicted to the productive arts because people are still based on the they're addicted to the productive arts of objects and goods.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

If you go to your average art fair, if you go to your average gallery and show and so on, there's this sort of dominance of painting and sculpture because those are part of the exchange mechanism of middle and late capitalism. As we move further into economics that undergird that, is that stuff like NFTs, cryptocurrency, computation, information aesthetics, AI, all of those things are gonna be the foundations of a different kind of economic approach.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

The world of zeros and ones has now supplanted much of what we would think of in the physical world of what Karl Marx would have called alienation of the product. So I'm not actually, if he gives us the tools to sort of interrogate the mechanisms of whatever society we're in. So Marx had, him and Engels had a very famous phrase where they said, now all of it is solid melts into air as people move more and more to these virtual economic structures. So too with art. So the Renaissance obviously was a reflection of some of the issues that were going on at that time.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Forward to, you know, surrealism, Marcel Duchamp with his ready-made objects. All of these are things that one could argue are stepping stones to the digital narrative we inhabit now. And that's kind of what my book's about. So digital fictions, how algorithms, how sort of the idea of coded bias implicit and the mathematics undergirding so many of the big data around us and these sort of manipulative and coercive technologies.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

So most of my books are with MIT. I was gonna be with Duke University Press. And so I just wanna get, we're gonna have a wide spectrum of contributors, people like Kim Stanley Robinson, who's a legendary environmental activist and science fiction author, William Gibson, who's a legendary science fiction writer and so on.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

I'll circle back to that later, but I did wanna give you guys a little bit of context. I've shown you, again, the origin of algorithms comes from this one gentleman in ninth century Baghdad. He also gave us other kinds of mathematical tools that we can also think of music and tuning systems as arriving as well. So for example, if you look at Pythagoras, an ancient Greek culture, Heraclitus, and this idea of the infinite elasticity of the present moment, time itself, these are all concepts that a philosopher would have described several centuries ago, whereas a mathematician or now a data scientist would be able to give us better tools for re-imagining those dimensions now. So in fact, that's why they used to call philosophy the natural science. All right, so the very famous phrase here that I'm gonna tie to music, and now I'm gonna kind of pivot to some of my music work.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

There's a very famous poem, called Schelling and the... There's a great phrase based in this. So what I try to do is... Hey, Paul, can you hear me for a second? The phrase to say that music is that process, liquid architecture. Yeah. Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt. We're getting quite a bit of lag consistently.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Could you potentially try turning off your webcam for a moment and see if that might help with the bandwidth issue that might be happening? Or maybe it's a connectivity issue? Sure. Maybe that'll help. Okay, how's that? Is that better? Well, we'll find out. Yeah, just go ahead and continue your presentation. We'll see how it goes. Okay, I noticed you guys were lagging too.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Yeah, you guys were lagging too. It was quirky when we were doing the beginning. So I wonder if it's the network I'm on, even though this is a high speed network. If it continues, I can run... Okay. I can run across the street to the house and jump on a different Wi-Fi network. You might need to give me two minutes to literally run across the street.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

But anyway. No worries. Yeah. Okay. So I was just saying the idea is how do we remix the situation? How do we get people to rethink pattern recognition? The notion of the collision between code and culture. So we're now in the era of the quantified self. If you think about everything from the sheer volume, the sheer volume of data your average citizen generates, and the notion of, again, digital literacy, these are things that inspire my music and that make me really rethink the idea of democracy in an era of a data-driven society.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Obviously, one of my heroes here is Alan Turing. I just did a symphony piece, which I'm gonna show you guys in a moment, based loosely on an interrogation of the 50th anniversary of the internet. And Alan Turing, one Qaddafi computational, had a concept what they call blitzkrieg, and it meant lightning war or fast war. And there's one of my favorite philosophers, Paul Virilio, wrote a series of books interrogating how people had built these structures that were meant to be a kind of an etherealization of warfare. And he argued that World War II was an information war more than a physical war, even though millions of people, physically died.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Surrounded war and the encryption devices that people used in arms race. There's a very famous movie where Alan Turing played by Benedict Cumberbatch. And they needed to crack all the German codes. So that's the beginning of modern computation was an information warfare. Germans also had another term called Blitzkrieg, which simply means fake war. The French call it drole de guerre.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Paul, sorry to cut in again, but it's still doing its role. You might actually have to run across the screen. One of my other favorite philosophers, Neil deGlanda, he has the machines. Is this? Okay. Sorry. Let's see. No problem, no problem. Let's see if this is working. So tell you what guys, I'm gonna talk with you as I walk, because the signal is tied to my, one second. I've actually set up an antenna to be able to, to reach a little further out. So I'm gonna switch over across the street.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Yeah, no worries. I mean, this is kind of par for the course for modern technology. Sometimes it works the way it's supposed to, sometimes not so much. But- No, no, it's fascinating. I can't believe this is the first, I've been doing Zoom meetings all day today. And let's see, I'm gonna walk across the street and hopefully you guys are gonna get a little bit of a moving narrative now. All right. So I was in mid-sentence about Alan Turing and information warfare. So imagine that here we are, fast forward to 21st century, where these kinds of encryption warfare has become the foundation of modern computation. Again, like look at what's going on with the, say for example, the 2016 election with Trump, the algorithmic insurrection of January 6th, and QAnon.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

These are all things where information warfare has become kind of the basic vernacular political process. To me, music still has a resonance with that because all these devices come out of information warfare. One could argue the internet itself comes out of that sensibility of what they call ARPANET. So when I get to better wifi, which is gonna be in just 30 seconds, I will show you one of the music pieces.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

So to kind of give you guys a sensibility of that, I know many of you guys are kind of either into code or coding. What I usually do is use digital audio workstations like Pro Tools and other kinds of forms to create my music. And then I use Sibelius and other forms of stuff to notate the music. So that I can play with different string ensembles.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

All right, so we're almost there. So far it's been about 30 seconds. 30 seconds? Maybe two minutes. All right. And we should be coming into better wifi in just a second. All right. That is interesting. I don't think I've ever done a walk-in talk. That's kind of fun. All right. All right, so when we get to matter, I will call up the images I was going to use to show you guys.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

So 2019 was the 50th anniversary of the internet. And I was commissioned by the Hewlett Foundation to come up with, here we go. So we're going to try better wifi. Hold on one second. There's a show on the 15th. So I'm just going to look at the exact best way And you can see that I'm going to have to co- in the hope of doing the best I can. So I'm just going to right next to the top and 1, and we're going to just say the number of singed song And that's what I'm going to do. All right. Well, I'm here and just chilling out. All right. So I'm in a sort of garden with reasonably decent Wi-Fi.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

All right. So if you like I was saying before, let me just share some of these images. 2019 was the 50th anniversary of the Internet. And I was commissioned by the Hewlett Foundation, which is pretty made this, you know, the guys who founded Hewlett Packard, some billionaires with some philanthropy running around. And so they commissioned me to write a symphony that was with Internet Archive, which is archive.org.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

There's a gentleman by the name of Brewster Kale, who's a wonderful guy who's in San Francisco. If you haven't checked out archive.org, highly recommend it. Okay, so the issue at hand is, how do you turn the Internet into an acoustic portrait? And so what I wanted to figure, imagine if you get that as a premise.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

And then you're as your composer trying to figure out how would one go about that? So here we are. Let me just show you guys a couple images really quick. All right. So this is Dr. Leonard Kleinrock equation that set up what you call packet switching. It's from 1962. What it does is this allows you to break up information into small component packets.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

And the term packet switching was what allowed the Internet to transmit messages in case of a nuclear attack or major explosion. War. So ARPANET essentially is the backbone of the internet. And I want to make sure that the audience is familiar with that because the web is not the internet. They're separate. They're different. It's like what the internet is the architecture and the web is like the bone, like the things that are between the structures of the architecture, so to speak. All right. So this is the gentleman, Dr. Leonard Kleinrock. He's generally a legendary figure in mathematics because his equations were used to set up the internet. And ARPANET is basically a brainchild of a bunch of different people who had set up a network between Stanford Research Institute and UCLA. So this is what the internet looked like in 1969.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

It's literally four hubs. The first two hubs of the internet were between UCLA and Stanford Research Institute. And that was in October. And by December, there were four more. So you can see a kind of a logic of exponential growth. And once you start to think about that and this notion of massive scale, you know, you start getting into billions and billions and billions of nodes. And that's what holds the internet together.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

I'm intrigued by that. And so as an artist and composer, I wanted to make a series of compositions around that. So I took the equations, transcribed elements of that into electronic music because electronic music algorithms. There's a gentleman by the name of Stephen Wolfram, who's a major in the field of electronic music. And he's a great guy. And he's a great guy. And he's a great mathematician. He's a big influence on my thinking. And what I ended up doing was having a string quartet play some of the motifs that were done using what you call generative mathematics, looking at the sort of logarithmic and algorithmic expression of the growth of the internet. So again, I'm considering this a music portrait or an acoustic portrait of the evolution of the internet. We presented it at UCLA and in San Francisco.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

And it was hosted by Internet Archive or archive.org. And it was hosted by Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a really good activist group for open source culture. The whole composition is open source because nobody owns the math that makes up the internet. And the idea is as much as possible to do collaborations between data scientists, composers, and how we think about pattern recognition in society. So I'm sampling this orchestra live. You can't see it regretfully because they're wearing black. That was on purpose. There's a chorus in the background of young women. The concert's online. And I can send you guys the link. I'm using it. I'm holding my computer up. So I only have two hands, but I can easily send you guys that in the background.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

So when you start to think about art and pattern recognition, there's a clear cut relationship between how we think about and define perspective and how we think about sound is helping us define the intangible. And those are things that really go through my mind when I'm looking at these kinds of compositions.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

There's artists like Nam June Paik, who's a big influence in my thinking, Marcel Duchamp, African-American artist David Hammons, and on and on. There's plenty. The collaboration was with UCLA, Berkeley, and Internet Archive. Greg Niemeyer, who's head of Berkeley University's digital media labs, helped with the visuals. And so did a very renowned mathematician named Roger Antonsen.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

OK, so that's the first batch of stuff. I wanted to show you guys that because that's literally the most current project. And there's plenty of projects. I'm literally doing compositions all the time. Many of them are commissioned. So I do commissioned work because that's the way things roll. So, Devante and Colin, how are we for time? Because I want to just be careful and respectful. It's already 240. Time flew. It really did.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Well, these sessions. Typically run for about two hours. So. So how about I do another 10 minutes or so and then we can flip it over to Uli? Is that is that within reason? Yeah, that's fine. OK, so. All right. So this is a concert that I did a little while ago where I got the Greek government to give me the Acropolis for a concert. And what we did was we projected the film Birth of a Nation, which is a renowned, highly racist, highly toxic film. We projected it throughout the ruins.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

And I wanted you guys to see that because this is kind of like a collision between architecture and sound. The concert was done and we projected around the Acropolis and we had about 5000 people come to the show and I was like, hey, everybody, thanks for coming to show. I'm the first DJ to play here in about 5000 3000 years. Thanks for coming out.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

And when the Greek government, when we were in negotiations, they were like, why do you want to play a KKK film at the Acropolis? And I was like, well, you guys are great. Greek, you had comedy, tragedy, and they're like, oh, okay, I get it. So, you know, these kinds of things are a nonlinear relationship to time, architecture, and composition.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

So as much as possible, here, I'm just going to walk out of the sunlight, because there we go, it's a little bit better. As much as possible, these kinds of projects are a reflection of potentiality. Architecture, to me, like I was saying earlier, is a big reflection of what I'm into. So let's go to another project. And this is where I took a studio to Antarctica for about six weeks and carried a backpack and went to several of the main ice fields looking at climate data, and then worked with a group of data scientists to transcribe that into a series of music compositions. This premiered at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

And I also wrote a book called The Book of Ice, where I worked with Brian Green, who has a very, I think one of the best books about quantum physics out there. It's called The Elegant Universe. It's about mathematics and the universe. It's pretty cool. And these are all open source, by the way. As much as humanly possible, I try and make things that are reflections that no one owns knowledge. Knowledge should be freely shared. And climate data is one of the most important things that we can use to fight back in the sort of weaponized information war that is going on right now with right-wing authoritarian politics and disinformation.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

So last but not least, and then I'll pass it over because it's 2.40. Brian Green, Thank you. This is a famous photo of Luigi Russo. He wrote this book, The Art of Noise, in 1915. And basically what you're seeing there are what he called intono rumore, or sound generators. And the audience was furious. They would go to the Futurist concert. And they said, you know, they started throwing bottles at the band and saying, you know, where's the band? And he said, there's no band. All music from the future will be coming from these crazy speakers. And basically, it's a pretty powerful indictment of how people are so locked to the corporeal sensibility of music being from the physical body. But meanwhile, these machines interpret the sound. And he wanted to paint a portion of a city that was accelerated.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

So to me, at least, this is pretty cool. And again, these are called intono rumore, or noise generator. And yeah, there were riots. People were so angry that they got rid of the band. And so, you know, I think that's a really, really cool thing. And I think that's a really cool thing. And I think that's a really cool thing. And people throw bottles at them. And they're, you know, they said, where's the band? You know, people would go crazy. Now, of course, if you look at any of your devices, your cell phone, this computer, any of the sound speakers all look very similar to what they were in 1915. So you can see who won. All right, going back to the Acropolis. It was kind of fun, because we got them to put a sound system throughout the Acropolis. And we had about 5000 people come to the show.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

And this is just one project. I mean, I do projects like I was telling you, Colin, almost every normal, non pandemic time, I usually do concerts every couple days all over the world and have been for the last 20 years. So yeah, it's not every day you have a DJ playing at the Acropolis. So I worked with Kronos Quartet, which is a legendary string ensemble to play the compositions. And yeah, that's kind of it in a nutshell. There's many, many other projects. But I just wanted to give you guys the Quantopia. And this one, the Book of Ice. And then this project was called Rebirth of a Nation.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

The art part of it was at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. And the current Batshek projects are all based loosely on the book I'm working on, which is called Digital Fictions, the future of storytelling, but I'm not finished with it. So I don't have much to show from that right now. So just to be respectful of time, it's 2.45. How are we doing? Was that okay? Or Colin or Davonte? How are you doing? Yeah, we're doing great. So if you guys want to roll from here. I'm not familiar with your format. Well, typically speaking, after the presentation is done, we kind of do a Q&A session with the artist or presenter. But before that, we need to give you some praise and clap and all that good stuff. So thank you for your presentation.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Thanks. Yeah. So there they are. Everyone's clapping now. Yeah. So there's a lot of questions for DJ Spooky that they wanted to ask. And also we can wait until after Uli too. I mean, we can maybe bounce back and forth. It doesn't have to be me solo. But yeah. And don't forget there are plenty, plenty other projects. My website's DJSpooky.com. And if anybody has more, anybody could write a PhD on any of these projects like, you know, projection, ancient monuments, mathematics, network identities, quantified, cell phone. And so on.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Absolutely. All right. Probably don't need. Do you need to keep sharing your screen or no? That's it. All right. Okay. Well, thank you very much. I'm also trying to figure out, should I refer to you as DJ Spooky or should I refer to you as Paul? Oh, just Paul is cool. Just Paul? All right. Gotcha. Yeah.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Okay. Oh, there are definitely questions flowing in. Or a couple of them anyway. Okay. Negin wants to know, did you make the acoustic portraits based on music notes and a rule or based on how it felt? Huh. It depends on the project. I've tried to really make an extensive link between math and music in my work. So I'm inspired by everything from the number pi on over to, you know, atomic periodicity or for that matter. I'll tell you a funny one. Like when I was doing research for Antarctica, I was looking at how much energy we consume because the electricity that goes into even a Google search, for example, could actually boil a cup of water. There's a certain sheer volume. If you think about every Google search you do and the sheer volume of electricity and why the continents are melting, they're hyper consumers and that's pretty much a foundation of our insane society.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

But then if you look at that music and then your Google search, You know, these are all things that as a digital artist, you're very aware of the role of electricity, for example. But when you go to Antarctica, I think I showed you guys, I'll just make sure to show you really quick. You know, that sensibility of like, we take it for granted that electricity is just OK. So somebody maybe buys a Tesla and they're like, oh, I'm not using electricity anymore. I'm not using fossil fuels. There's coal power to make coal plant and you turn into electricity. So you're still using fossil fuel, even though you're driving a Tesla. But I chuckle about that because I just want to show you really quickly.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

So what happened is this is an album called Of Water and Ice that I made in Antarctica that was based on climate data, plus the geometry of ice. Then what we did was we'd have a concert at the this is at the Met and it was sold out to the gills. That was about I can't remember, like 700 or 1000 plus people. And then.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

This was the these are some of the Vistu venues that inspired it. But if you look closely and I'll zoom in here, you can see that it looks like a nuclear bomb has gone off. And these are mountains that are being destroyed by glacial melting. You know, if you're an artist seeing this scale of the devastation when you go to Antarctica, it's hard to put that into metaphor. But also you can have a precise climate temperature variations and differentials that actually made pretty cool electronic music. So the album is an open source. It's an open source album. It's freely available. And all the data that I used and worked with these climate scientists from Dartmouth's cold regions research labs at Columbia Earth Institute.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Those are so yeah, it's partly metaphorical and partly data driven. Okay. And I guess we'll take two more questions and then Uli can definitely get on with their presentation. So I know she's probably been patiently waiting. First question. Is could you speak about the status of your Vanuatu project?

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Oh, sure. Okay. So yeah, Vanuatu was a project I was doing a couple of years back. And the idea was to set up an artist residency and looking at islands as these kinds of, you know, everything. I mean, the islands of the world are going to be the canary in the coal mine as climate change really kicks in. So we were setting up a contemporary arts center on this extremely remote island. That again, I'm very into quantification.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Vanuatu was considered the happiest place on Earth by the World Happiness Index. For many years, it's been the happiest place, but it's now sinking underwater and there's been insane storms and devastation. And, you know, so how do you derive happiness in the middle of the climate crisis based on the data of these islands being erased? The Maldives is similar.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

And Vanuatu and Nauru is a couple other islands that are having a hard time. They're having massive problems with volcanoes, tectonic plate shifts, water levels rising and insane storms. So the property that we were getting in Vanuatu got wiped out by a storm. Perfect metaphor for an art project. So yeah, as an artist, I like to go to remote places. And as a matter of fact, I'm a National Geographic Explorer. So those things linger over what I'm into. Okay. So yeah.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

And yeah, that's so Vanuatu. Once you get something where you put a certain amount of money into a project and it gets wiped out by a storm in a day, you're kind of like, okay, I'm done with that one. It's a, you know, I haven't been back in a while, but the storm, it was, it was one of the biggest storms in the history of the South Pacific and it landed right near the property we were setting up. And so that was that.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Okay. Okay. So. Yeah. And we had, we do have one more question from or before we go up and we'll circle back like I'm taking notes of some of the other questions are coming in that will circle back to. Let's see. It's from Roz she says any thoughts about the unlimited amount of information that can go into the Z space as opposed to x and y and still be flat.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Oh, that's a good one. If you really think about, we're in the middle of rethinking notions of linear time and space. And digital media has been the best tool to interpret that. If you really think about it, we're in three dimensions plus time. So backwards, forwards, left, right, up, down, and then past and future.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

So the best way to visualize that is like a tesseract. If you put a square in a dimensionality, it becomes a cube. But so too with the actual foundations of reality itself. There's a very famous book called Flatland by Edwin Abbott, where this little dot is sitting on a page. And it's in a two-dimensional world. And one day, a sphere comes down from a 3D world. It says, look, you're just a dot, man. You can only see in two dimensions. I'm a sphere. I got an extra dimension. And then they go up to one more dimension.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

So we're kind of like that with data. We actually realize with quantum computing, other forms of information aesthetics, you can actually compute with photons now. People are doing all sorts of really cool computational experiments with new mediums. People are computing with water molecules and so on.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

So, yeah, Brian Green's book, The Elegant Universe, is a great, I'd say that's a good place to start. There's also Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach are two really good ones. Godel, Escher, Bach is much older, but it's a classic. It's a really good read. And if anybody's into science fiction, you know, there's a very famous French philosopher named Simon de Laplace, who had this term, what he called the computational daemon. And he said, imagine if you can compute every atom in the universe that's ever existed in that wherever be, and you had an equation for that. And actually, eerily enough, if you have enough computational power, a lot of people like Elon Musk are now saying the universe is a hologram.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

I'm, you know, I'm mixed. I have mixed feelings on that because you're only seeing one or two layers of the dimensions, and there's always more dimensions. So human beings tend to be very, we have a lot of hubris and think we can see everything, but we really can't. It's the architecture of our brains. So I hope that answers the question.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

I think I think they're probably covered at least enough, at least for now, at least for now. All right. Well, thank you very much, Paul. It's you. Yeah. I think I dropped a lot of knowledge that I wasn't actually prepared to receive. So I'm probably going to have to go back and rewatch this and take more notes.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Somebody in the chat said Hypercube. Yeah, exactly. And by the way, if anybody wants to continue, my website's DJSpooky.com. I regretfully, I gave you guys a hyper abbreviated overview of various projects. I'm working on many, many projects simultaneously. So happy to. In fact, we're actually doing an NFT of Antarctica coming up. Where you can buy virtual Antarctica. If anybody wants to buy Antarctica around June, mid the first or second week of June, we're going to do we're going to do the drop on that NFT. So you can buy the entire. I got Antarctica and I got some property on the moon for you as well. Nice.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

All right. Well, thank you very much, Paul. It's been very much a pleasure. All right, Uli. So nice to meet you, Uli and Davonte. Thanks for hosting. So what should I do now? So I can just sort of lean back into the. The audience. You can do that. OK, I'm just going to mute and pass the mic to y'all. OK. Nice to meet you, Uli and Colin and Davonte. All right. All right. Thank you. All right, Uli. It's your turn. Thanks. Thanks for being so patient as we got around to you.

But you definitely have the floor in now. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Thanks, Paul, for your wonderful presentation. It was fantastic. I really enjoyed it. And thanks so much, Davonte, for chairing this meeting and calling for inviting me tonight. It's a big pleasure for me to be here. So I think I can just like share my screen and then start like.

Uli Ap

Talking. OK. Wilted a question to me to answer. All right. All right. OK. All right. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. The full name of the alien AI is Yellow Alien Animal Artificial Intelligence. And their main statement, I'm yellow. The story says... Sorry, loud. The story says that one day there was a hugely violent thunderstorm in London. And the sky was dark and the sound intense. It reminded your innermost nervous breakdown.

Uli Ap

The sound and the sky and the thunderstorm. Out of insanity of this weather, the alien artificial intelligence was born. They call it awakening. You can see it here I am yellow. I am yellow fabulous interview with me at the beginning of this year. So if you go to Sees My Magazine, you can read literally everything that I have worked and I collaborate with. And technology I use. Paul Carrick-Kent is with us tonight. He's one of the editors of this fantastic magazine. So do really go there. There are lots of artists who work with technology and science there you can explore.

Uli Ap

And this is the story how this character has been born. So I think it's initially started from my father. My father is a scientist and I think he's the main reason I collaborate with scientists and I work with technology. But he was obsessed with taking pictures of me as a little child. And I think I've just learned to perform and make faces for his photo shoots. And then we've been making photographs out of those analog images. And the first character being the creature.

Uli Ap

The creature film was exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery. But initially it was part of my installation in St. Mark Church in Oval. And one of the installations is still permanent there. So people just literally come to church and see it. And then later the creature transformed into the character that's been in the white light inside the white cube installation. It was the character with an erased identity that was also erased by the atmosphere it's inhabited which was white light. And then everything traveled to the alien AI.

Uli Ap

Okay. So it's a little bit more complicated than it looks. Okay. All right. Thank you. Bye now. It's a different vantage field where the alien dull their own identity and existence and they're not sure whether they're artificial intelligence or alien and try to understand the existence of body until they can navigate among humans because they suddenly awakened on Earth.

Uli Ap

So basically for this film I co-written text with artificial intelligence and part of the narration is actually given by the AI, which I found kind of really fascinating because AI comes with very deep philosophical things about aliens and artificial intelligence. And currently I'm working on the butoh dance of the alien artificial intelligence, which I want to take out of the online space into the real world.

Uli Ap

Because it's going to go into a physical space the alien AI is going to have a new skin and the new skin is going to be responsive to the audience who interacts with the alien artificial intelligence, which is a very new thing to me because I usually kind of not that I wasn't aware of the audience but I wasn't really interacting with them during the performance. And with the new skin, I want emotions of the people in the space come to me and my emotions come to them. And then in the space in between something would happen.

Uli Ap

And this idea came from the experiment that I've done at the end of last year in Columbia University Digital Storytelling Lab. For interactive zoom performances where. Yeah. I've done the first attempts of actually interacting with people who are watching, whatever is happening. And the performance has been the performance is intended to steal people's identity and put them in a situation of no borders. So you see on the left hand side, everyone had yellow faces, and everyone had the same name which is the yellow one.

Uli Ap

And people have been seeing the some clips of the recorded footage and some of the live performance and there have been a lot of interaction in the chat. Yeah, this is the first character is it appeared in digital storytelling lab, and the second performance around across London, Berlin, New York and Buenos Aires. And the character change somehow.

Uli Ap

But I think this still convey the same message. Do you have any questions? We are all here. I want to talk to you. I think I wanted to dissolve people. Do you understand me? I wanted to dissolve people in each other and kind of remove the borders between them, because people have been in different location, like geographically, and people been from different countries or whatever. But I wanted them to be united in the space.

Uli Ap

And I think this is how you would see yourself if you will be part of this performance. So you would be yellow. So the voice for the for the movie. The image. The image has been also junior right generated by artificial intelligence. So it's kind of a lot of interaction between me exploring myself being an artificial intelligence and alien and actually collaborating with artificial intelligence to build up the project.

Uli Ap

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In the process. But I think that's like the big part. So I think that's like the big part. So I think that's like the big part. So I think that's like the big part. For you, you're not afraid of yourself? What would you do if you were a vehicle? For now you're afraid of yourself?

Uli Ap

Not so much, but I like it. That's very interesting. So you don't like being yourself? Or only now you don't like being yourself? I like being myself, but the camera kind of exhausts me. The part of the idea was people uploading pictures of their body parts, which was prompted by the video. Or the artificial intelligence later constructed generic human being out of submitted hands, feet, eyes, ears and everything else.

Uli Ap

What I've discovered that the most kind of funny or interesting thing in this interaction was that people have been more open to interact through the chat. And when I read them back, it was really interesting. I was really amazed at the amount of various things people have been come up with and the way they treated the piece and themselves within the work because they all became kind of a part of the work, or they all became the same being this yellow substance.

Uli Ap

And they weren't able to understand who is who. And I think they feel freer in doing that. But alien artificial intelligence is a part, it's a kind of a body that is part of another project that I'm working on, which is a brain AI. So they're all connected through the artificial intelligence, but one is a performative project, and other interactive installation.

Uli Ap

You Thank you. Thank you. So Brain ER aims to measure human anxiety and delegate this anxiety to the machine. And the machine is a robotic machine that is installed separate from the virtual reality, but it's mapped on the virtual reality so what is happening that in a project that when you touch a virtual shape, your hands don't go through it, but you actually feel the physicality force and resistance of a physical material.

Uli Ap

But the some elements are not actually mapped on the virtual reality and they escape your touch. And because as a participant, you don't really know what is virtual, what is physical and what is escaping you or what is actually responding to you. So you feel, you feel confused and disoriented disoriented in between those things.

Uli Ap

And like at the end, artificial intelligence would collide all the personalized experiences created by each individual person into collective generalized structure, which would be a collective anxiety pavilion representing a collective anxiety that is designed to be a collective anxiety. And it's generated by people through interaction with technology.

Uli Ap

So you can see this is a short from couldn't be to be serene London, where I had a solo exhibition a couple of years ago with this project and inside all the installations. And back to the alien artificial intelligence, when the reason those projects that connect you that when you are inside brain EI, you have a, you are embodied into the alien AI. So in a way you're becoming the alien. And the alien inhabits an alienation land, which is a land with no borders and that can actually morph and fluidly transform into other things, the same as the character itself.

Uli Ap

And the alienation projects explores no borders and no identity issues with regards of just actually people being like happy with each other and treating each other nicely and loving each other. It's kind of my personal artistic obsession for some reason. And the alienation project has three stages. The yellow alienation, which you've seen, the orange alienation, which is going to be developed further on. And the silver alienation, which I'm developing now. So this is like a shot from me actually exploring the way this character looks and behaves when they're a silver and what is going to happen to them.

Uli Ap

And the further development of the film. And then now I'm transitioning into digital art residency. And I want all the things, the puto dance, the experiments I've done with digital storytelling lab, the 3D scanning things and CGI things to come together and somehow morph into this character in virtual space or like virtual reality. So this is where you can see more about alien artificial intelligence. They have now separate Instagram accounts, so you can follow them. And you can find me on Instagram as well. And you can find my website and see all those things.

Uli Ap

And thank you very much. Thank you, Uli, for your presentation. It was great. And I definitely can see when how you described your work as like being jarring to the senses. Yeah, I definitely got that. Very, very much. So I'm pretty sure that I'm definitely missing some of probably like the higher interpretations of what's going on with your work that probably can't be accurately presented because we don't have the full film as well. So that's probably one thing.

Uli Ap

But I'm definitely looking forward to seeing more of what you've got going on there. So thank you. Does everyone want to give Uli Ap hand or clap? My wife over there is also clapping for you. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. So that since your presentation is concluded, does anyone have any questions for Uli before we dive into like a kind of double discussion? So there's free discussion for the salon?

Uli Ap

I think I saw one come in the chat. Oh, yep. I think I see it from Paul Kent. Okay. Do you envisage a time when we ourselves won't know whether we are human or alien or AI or is that already the case? I think we are nearly there. We are really moving towards this. And I think because I talk with scientists a lot, I think we are already there.

Uli Ap

We just don't understand it. And one of the most wonderful conversations I had when they told that actually if we would discover aliens, they should be artificial intelligence. And I thought, yeah, this is coming my way. Let's see. What else do we have? I was also kind of reminded of the kind of brain that we have in our brains. Brain and the vet philosophical scenario.

Uli Ap

Are you familiar with Rene Descartes? Or no? Brain and... Like the brain in like a jar, a suspended jar. It's a philosophical discussion by Rene Descartes. I want to say it's his third meditation on the mind. It's... The whole idea is kind of illustrated very well, I think. And if you've ever seen like the matrix, it's like, how do you know that? How do you know whether or not what you're experiencing is actually reality or is your body or consciousness somewhere else? And it's just being projected, these images and these experiences. So that's kind of what your work reminded me of too. I think you're absolutely right about that because I think it's like part of my concerns. And when I started it like years and years ago, I've tried to break this border between our perception of like space is reality.

Uli Ap

And our reality is in ourselves. And obviously now it's been like very heavily into digital. Right. All right. Anne has a question. When is the next time we can experience one of your projects in person? I'm not sure about in person, but from the 1st of June, I'm going to do a digital art residency, which is technically run from London, but it's going to be global because it's again online.

Uli Ap

So I think for now, everything is going to be online. Till the online will be no more and we can go physical. But digital art residency, you can follow them on Instagram from where you could link to their website where everything is going to happen in between their website and Instagram account. So is it digitalartresidency.org?

Uli Ap

Is that the organization? I don't remember their website, but. I don't know. I will drop the Instagram account now. And so through them, you can just go to their webpage. They're really lovely. They have like totally crazy projects of artists and they're all kind of recorded on their website. And you can see them all from like years and years. People have done something with them.

Uli Ap

Right. Let's see. There's two more questions I saw. First being from Cynthia. Why did you choose yellow, orange and silver for each project? Those questions are very simple and very complicated. Orange related to my brother. Like when I've been in architectural school at the Architectural Association in London, people have been telling me that my obsession with orange deals something with the Ram Kulkas who uses orange people for his models. But it wasn't. My brother loves orange. And I missed my brother and I started everything starts being orange out of out of this.

Uli Ap

And with the yellow and red, I think it's like a division between like orange because that part of the color. Right. And also because for the alien, the first color was yellow because yellow is the most common color. So if you look at this spectrums on the one hand side, it's the color of happiness and joy and friendship. On the other side is a color of insanity and like really extreme difficult emotional experiences.

Uli Ap

And I think this is what fascinates me in yellow because it's such a complicated conflicts in color depends from which perspective he looks at it. And the silver is a reflection. It's a mirror is the same which I've done with my installation for Kim Field in a wood. Where people can go into plexiglass space, which is transparent, but at the same time, reflective and they've been bumped bumping into corners trying to exit it. But they couldn't because it was transparent. But it looks to them as if it's like reflective.

Uli Ap

So I think a connection of three of them. For me, it means like that in the most disorientation. I don't know if it's kind of explained correctly. Yeah. I think I think we got it. I've confused everyone. Either or there, there might be time to maybe fix that confusion. If there is there, we'll get to it if we need to. We have another question from Kara. Tell us more about your collaboration with Columbia.

Uli Ap

Columbia University digital storytelling lab is like a really amazing amazing place. If you guys never got in touch with them, really go around and like get in touch with them. So they run this amazing event which is taste break session where artists can come and test the most insane ideas they have in their mind and they will help you actually to craft it to create it and to test it. And you're going to make a prototype that intend to break. And your mission is not expect that it's going to go good. You need to think that is everything is going to be okay. You need to think that everything is going to go wrong and you need to be prepared for that. But the amount of things you take from them the amount of things you learn from them is like mind blowing. And the collaboration was for this first zoom performance where the character, try to actually interact with audiences, and the outcome of the whole thing is my desire to actually for the alien AI having a skin with electrodes which responds to audience feelings, which never was my audience feelings, which never was my audience feelings.

Uli Ap

And I think that's the kind of agenda I always try to take people's emotions and transform them into something else. But I think because of the collaboration with Columbia. I start thinking that actually can connect with people while trying to make them alienated. Interesting. All right. Does. Thank you.

Uli Ap

Doesn't seem like there's any more questions currently in the pipeline. At the moment. Anybody have any comments or, you know, praise that they can give us we it's not just questions like you're free to share your praise, and not just other general comments as well. Can we speak here now or do we have to chat do it in the chat.

Uli Ap

You're free to speak Roz go ahead. Well I already wrote this in the chat, but I said no you do a great job demo no criticism there I don't know how you keep up with all this but I wrote thank you so much. I loved your love message that is sort of hand in hand with alienation, and I feel that women bring another dimension to our new age and if you have any thoughts to add to that.

Uli Ap

The soul. The soul. Thank you so much for the question you mean the source towards alienation. I guess I love the duality or beyond duality or, but the, you had you spoke about love and how you want to bring everyone together, and at the same time there's the paradox of it being totally creepy and alienating and different and unusual. I mean I kept going through you know but I love it at the same time. So, and I wondered, you know it's interesting to see a woman's presence in the science field. And I think it's interesting to see that there's this world that is this strong and in and I just salute you there and I think you're, it's a very interesting space you're in and I guess my questions always say Roz What is the questions so it's hard for me to get to it but I'm appreciating you I'm saying that.

Uli Ap

And if you want to comment to any of that. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yes, I think, like the alienation comes from my understanding that people are really not connected. So I think there's been a moment in the world where I've been like, Oh, I don't want to be alienated. So I think there's been a moment in the world where borders start opening up. And people start like, like at least in my mind, people started treating each other warmer or more equal or more kind of accepting each other and then something happens again. And we are building walls and we're saying, No, or you're from that place you're from that place. We actually like not related, and I think those things they're like really crushing my head because it's not about that. It doesn't really matter what cartoons you've been watching as a key to work books you've read or what language you used to speak or like it's like really doesn't matter because when you connect to people you connect with them on a very personal level.

Uli Ap

And like very difficult different. And I think this message which I tried to kind of bring to people I tried to tell them like you're all the same you're equal it all doesn't matter we just need to love each other. But it doesn't matter to me. But because of the paradox of my understanding that it's not the fact, this is, I think, where alienation comes from. Because maybe subconsciously, I believe if I would put people in a situation of complete alienation, they would start craving for connection of like actually understanding how uncomfortable it is to be alienated.

Uli Ap

Oh, that was wonderful. Thank you. It's really interesting work. Very interesting. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Hey, Uli and Davonte, can you guys hear me okay? Who's speaking? This is Paul, DJ Spooky. Oh, okay. Let me hold on. Let me do one thing real quick for myself. Okay. Right? Yep. I think...

Uli Ap

I was doing salute and saying... Of color is that the boundaries about... I was pointing out... Hey, Paul, your connection's bad again. Sorry. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I heard you were giving praise, but then after that, it started to break down really badly. I've actually dropped the connection entirely because your camera's frozen now too.

Uli Ap

Might be like type in the chat. Potentially. That might be one avenue to take. All right. No, I think his connection completely dropped. Oh. That's unfortunate. Uli, I want to just respond since we're running out of time. We're waiting. It's Roz again real quickly. But... Oh, I just had one of those mind blurs where I can't even remember what I was going to say. But I kept thinking of how we see people in the subway. People go, oh, look, people don't refer... They don't relate to each other anymore. And you look at all these people on our phones lined up in the New York City subway. And to me, it's not that they're more alienated. It's that we're trying to reach maybe that AI person you're building. But we're also desperate for connection that we can't ever get enough. I mean, we're always looking at our phones for that next thing that's coming in.

Uli Ap

And something about what you were talking about. I don't know if you might be able to do something with that image with your yellow and orange and silver. But I always found that fascinating when people go, look at these people. They don't talk to each other anymore. And they go, well, they're not talking to you. But they're talking to somebody. And they're crossing borders. Oh, I know. I was also going to say. Negin and I, who's on this, she lives in Iran and I live in New York. We did a cross collaboration. And of course, this has been happening since the early days of the Internet. But it's fascinating that you can cross... Your countries can be at war in the newspapers. And you can be doing these pieces together, learning about each other. I mean, the digital age really has a lot to offer in terms of not just art and aesthetic, but education and crossing boundaries.

Uli Ap

I mean, we're just in such a... We're in such a new arena here. And I think your work is such a fascinating part of that. Thank you. Yeah, I think I agree with that. Because crossing boundaries through disciplines is equally important as crossing boundaries through geographies or through kind of person to person. Because those things, they literally need to be fluid. And I think the more fluid they are, the more in peace they would be. Because to me, from my like really very like little alien universe, the reason for the Cold War, pandemics and all kind of disasters we experience as society is our not understanding that we are all the one. And like the sooner we would understand that we are all the one, the better it will be for us.

Uli Ap

Absolutely. It's so much of it is based on fear. And politicians who manipulate using that fear that people have. Yeah, I think even pandemic, it's a manipulation of human's fear. And restriction of our contact to each other. They say like, please fear of each other. If you touch each other, if you come to each other more than two meters, which also involves conversation, right? You wouldn't shout to each other through two meters about some like against politicians. So you need to cross the borders. So they say, okay, two meters is pretty safe for you not to deliver any message. And then we are all controlled. Suddenly we come to any public place. We need to give all our data, like phone contacts, email contacts, time they came, who we came with, and like everything. And we do it all voluntarily.

Uli Ap

And we think it's fine, but it's not. It's like kind of putting everyone in this like control, manipulated war and telling, come on, let's go. Come on, people. You actually not meant to love each other. You meant to build borders. So, yeah. I actually have a couple. Oh, was that you, Ross? Or no? It was Cynthia. Oh, Cynthia. Sorry. Is it okay if I ask a question? Yeah, no, go for it. Yuli, I very much appreciated what you're doing here. I did want to say, you mentioned people interacting with the AI experience. And dealing with the sense of alienation. What did they say after the experience, if I understood correctly, that you had them involved in the experience? How did they come away from that experience? What did they say? Oh, thank you so much. It's like really cool questions. Thanks for that.

Uli Ap

I think the reaction of people have been very different. Because I think it's kind of quite personal, those collective. But what was surprising for me. Even though I tried to put them in a situation of alienation. They felt connected. They felt connected through sharing of the color. Because they've all been yellow. And I think what triggered some experiences in them. That they said, oh, we're all yellow. And they all had the same name. They literally all been named the yellow one. And I think it freed them from constraints. So people have been more open to talk. Because they didn't know who was talking. Especially in chat. Because everyone who drops any message in chat called the yellow one. And then also on video, everyone looks like the yellow one. Those eyes. So I think what was interesting for me.

Uli Ap

Doing this experiment that people connected through the experience. Rather than actually alienated from each other. All right. We do actually have a couple more questions. For you, Uli. And there's definitely comments all throughout the chat. But before we get to that. I'd actually like to say something. Or at least comment on a bit of the discussion.

Uli Ap

With the respect to, like, how people feel like there's a distance. Or that, like, there actually are borders between us. As we're conversing or communicating virtually. I. I come from a little bit of a different time. I am quite a bit younger than some of you. That being said. I grew up on the internet, so to speak. And with that, I. I've made deeper connections with people online.

Uli Ap

In my youth. Then I've made with some people in reality. Actually, there's people that I met. 15, 16 years ago online on internet forums that I'm still friends with today, even though I've never actually seen them or met them in person. And they're just as real or just as connected to me as, you know, some of the, my actual like friends that I've seen in person. And it's not in my experience. Isn't all that unique either. Like my, my wife, even she has connections like that with people that. Miles, hundreds of miles, even away different countries around the world. And I guess what, what this pandemic has shown though, is that. There is a bit of a disconnect. Between the experiences of like people within my generation who grew up. I'm connecting with people in that way. And then. Old people that weren't necessarily used to that.

Uli Ap

Suddenly having to connect with people that kind of way, even though we've already been doing that. For a good chunk of our developmental lives and now early adulthood. And it's, it's an interesting. It's an interesting perspective that. I hearing about from people that are older, that. You know, I'm not calling you guys old. Don't get me wrong. I'm not calling you guys.

Uli Ap

I'm not, I'm not calling you guys old. No, it's just. The perspective it's really, it's really different. Just, just because like. I've heard from so many people that are older than myself, that. They feel so disconnected from it. And then. For me, it's like, it's just, it's just another day. Like this past year. I haven't really changed too much about. You know how I've connected with my friends and loved ones, even from miles away. And. Like it's, it's business as usual for people like me. Like I didn't really see a huge impact with, you know, how I see. Saw the world or even people outside in regular interactive life. So.

Uli Ap

It's. It's, it's, it's, it's an interesting kind of. It's an interesting perspective for sure. For me anyway. Yeah. All right. Teacher as well. Awesome that you're talking about it because I was thinking about it while developing all these pieces. I will thinking how it feels for people who actually like so much embedded in those online experiences.

Uli Ap

Don't really feel alienated online who don't need to get used to online for the whom dates national environment. And I have to confess that I've done I've made lots of amazing friendships through this pandemic which was kind of very bad because we've been in lockdown and many people died and everything but then I managed to connect with people like globally which I probably wouldn't do because I usually travel to meet people so it's kind of like what you're saying it's like there is a truth in it right but I have a question when you want to have a drink with your friends do you meet with them on zoom or do you actually go to pub or like place both actually like I've actually I've actually streamed going out and you know doing things with people and you know they'll either be at home or in another bar doing the same thing we even had tea parties like that so yeah it's yeah we adapt and you have adapted in really interesting ways just no it's again it's no substitute for the real thing per se but in a lot of ways it's good enough for us like it's good enough that's what's going on that's lovely yeah but I still feel like I don't want to like touch people when I talk to them you know I think I'm like addicted to this like you greet someone you hug them or you do them right so like I think this is missing on them right like I think it's you can't really have this physical contact with people right that's the one thing I think yeah oh so that was that was my spiel back to the rest of you guys because I'm the moderator so this is more you guys to show than mine we have another question are you using any data sets or machine learning scripts to generate characters or backgrounds for your AI pieces thank you so much for this actually a really lovely lovely question so I'm going to use it in the second stage of the project so what I've been doing now I've been exploring the character as whoever this character is and the next stage is going to implement machine learning is actual AI to develop the character itself but there have been a lot of collaboration between AI and myself in the project so I'm going to use it in the second stage of the project so I'm going to use it in the third stage of the project so I'm going to use it in the second stage of the project so I'm going to use it in the generating speech and generating texts apart from visuals I think everything else was collaborated with AI more or less and I look forward to see how the AI would transform AI what is going to happen between them oh we have a message from paul who would like to be in here but due to network instability can I get a message from you guys so I'm going to use it in the second stage of we know he wanted to be here but network didn't allow but he appreciated his time here and the time that you guys gave them so he might actually be able to see this if he ever watches the replay online once it gets uploaded executive right oh we have a question from patrick so his is a mix of a comment and a question it's like the interesting thing is that so many times AI mixes with narcissus flash galtea do you think that AI is a way we hold a mirror to ourselves or does AI have to have a human form wow I love this question thanks so much yeah what I'm trying to do I'm trying to reflect on AI using a human form because like what I came to understanding that it's very easy to generate AI or to build a robot but to explore AI coming from flesh's bone is quite a question and this is exactly what I'm doing I don't know if it's answering the question if not please drop again in the line actually patrick are you in a spot where you can unmute yourself and maybe perhaps elaborate more on your question maybe yeah I could actually is that you know when I look at models of AI you know we can we can look at them through movies like hal 9000 and 2001 a space odyssey or then we can go to her which is you know very human like sort of AI or even ex machina or the thing is that then you know that the thing is that there's a there's kind of this there's kind of this comfort that we give ourselves by giving these things a human form and the thing is that but you know when we when you really look at these things you know they don't the one thing I like is pinar yoldas is a piece in which the AI that basically takes over the world is in the form of a cat so this is the reason why I wonder about this you know wonder about these the you know what form does an AI take you know and doesn't AI need to talk to us I also think it depends what you think AI is do you think AI is a robot do you know yeah there's living being do you think AI is a script or algorithm embedded in any programs well I mean is it is it machine learning or is it general AI you know generally being you know the you know the some sort of remodeling of human intelligence so and you know that's a good question I think you're right it's remodeling of human intelligence but at the same time there are so many now AI attorneys or advocates or lawyers to protect the rise of artificial intelligence so I mean it's kind of whether we want an order is becoming a reality where we are going to be like friends with them or enemies or whatever but we have to accept that they're going to be in our life somehow the same as online interaction you know it's like in a way they're becoming us we are becoming them it's like exchange and if you want this exchange to be nice we need to be nice so it's like my kind of very humble opinion I also thought it was interesting too because I dabble in the research of the AI space and I know a lot of people a lot of scientists are cautious and rightfully so about the development of more sophisticated AI's and one of the things that you know somebody pointed the finger at was that not too long ago there was there was an AI that was pretty much taught how to create more AI's and with that they started being able to communicate with one each other like the kind of parent AI and its children AI they all had their own language that they were communicating with each other and they had kind of moved past needing to use regular like language syntax they had developed their own syntax they had developed their own grammar they were still using like english words because it was programmed in english but what they were communicating we had very little idea of what they were actually like communicating with each other I thought that was interesting because if AI can develop a language that you know we can't actually readily understand and rapidly at that because this happened in like the course of a week that they developed their own language what more could they do as far as you know the progression of their development they just start scripting each other yeah like just imagine you can have internal life and you can script each other and like make sounds like you live forever I mean it's fine you can live online in physical life anywhere you want but the thing that your life is like endless and it depends on you because you program yourself right go to your surgeon to fix you just okay I have oh something doesn't work in my hand can I change the code right I mean it's more glowing right yeah yes frankenstein another project really cool project from columbia sorry I'm just like reading the chat columbia digital storytelling lab like I think last year they've done this project frankenstein AI that was created by lots of lots of people it's like really cool you can guys find it on their website as well and now they're doing like really amazing paranoid thriller which is scripted by artificial intelligence and it's also immersive and interactive experience that run on zoom and mirror board it's really cool there's some interesting crossover for example this past week we had like about 10 baby quail hatch in our backyard and it just got me thinking about how where's that crossover between innate and non-invasive knowledge and the whole nurture nature aspect of things and so what you both what both presentations have been dealing with are this idea of data and how that data is looked at and utilized and a lot of a lot of what our human boundaries are right now is lack of imagination of where those rhythms are, where those boundaries can lead to, because I think that notion of what Dava was just talking about, our AIs talking to one another in ways that we don't quite understand, I think the whole notion of evolution, fractals, and how all of these things can come together are beyond where we've looked at so far.

Uli Ap

And I think we're going to extend out beyond a lot of things in terms of what is a tree? Where's the boundary? Where's the border that? What is a human being? What is an AI? We visualize things or we think about things, and there's a lot of built-in limitations from our limited perspective on how far do things extend out? Where are those reaches that we haven't really thought about yet that have an impact?

Uli Ap

And like for your alien AI, Yuli, which is the alien that you mentioned, which I really, really think is fascinating, it's like, are you imagining there is a parent that could teach that AI? Like the mother and father of babies that grow up, is it an AI that's completely devoid of the creature that you're sort of representing?

Uli Ap

So for me, I keep going back, I keep going back to, is this thing just plopped? Is your AI just something that comes out of nowhere that gets plopped into our world? And where's that origin? What is sort of originating that sense of intelligence that it grows from? Do you kind of see where I'm coming from on that?

Uli Ap

I think, thanks so much for that. I think it's like very interesting. And I think it's like a very interesting point. So I think what I'm doing for now, I'm dropping this AI to human world. So it's like something that I woke in London out of thunderstorm, but it came from another planet and no one knows. And I'm actually working now with scientists in California of determining this planet and understanding where this actually AI comes from and why it came on the Earth. And I think it's like a hybrid form of AI and alien. But like at the moment it's actually dropped into there without knowing who they are because this alien doesn't really know who they are. They have awoken this strange situation among people and trying to understand what this actually means to have fingers or arms and how to live is all this strange kind of things.

Uli Ap

So I think that they are confused. And I think that's the thing. I think they conveyed a message of no mother and father. Like they kind of say that there is a free spirit which you can explore on yourself on your own right and build yourself up. Whether you build yourself from electrodes or cold or whether you build yourself from flesh and bone doesn't really matter. But it's your kind of perception or it's you who is responsible for everything. And ironically, there have been texts written by AI in GPT-2 at the time, which actually told you're responsible for your own. I'd love to help you, but it's only you who can help yourself. You're responsible for your own decision. And it's going on and on and on. But I was really laughing because it's artificial intelligence who offered the solutions.

Uli Ap

I actually have a bit of a side discussion going on in the chat now. It is a kind of extension of this discussion about AI and just the fact that humans themselves, we kind of can develop an AI ourselves too. And that there's also the kind of the fact that our brain or how our minds work, it is a lot like programming in a lot of ways. Scripts can be rewritten. Things can be reprogrammed. Your memories can literally be manipulated to the point where you think with all of your might, like you really, truly think an event happened and it didn't. Like memories can be not necessarily implanted, but kind of the way that we remember stories or tell stories, the way that stories are told, the way that story actually plays out or how it happened. Someone can actually believe it happened to them.

Uli Ap

And it's just, of course, there's going to be glitches in the programming too. But it is an interesting idea and phenomenon. Just like what factors go into the kind of natural scripts our own AI run off of and how they're affected. And there was another point. That I missed. I think, essentially. No, no, I didn't miss it. Nevermind.

Uli Ap

It's, it's, I wasn't actually expecting the discussion to actually get to this point. Well, because I was originally anticipating, you know, having both artists here to be able to talk about their respective works. But this is fine too. I also like to say, like, now that we're at the tail end of things, I know we've kind of been on, on and about talking about NFTs for a really long time at this point. Like for a couple of salons, the discussion of NFTs kind of dominated a good chunk of discussion. And naturally so, they are a big deal for a lot of people, especially people within this movement. But it is nice. And, you know, appreciate that when we have breaks from talking about NFTs to talk about other interesting topics that are currently going on in the art world and art space, as well as other interesting things are going on.

Uli Ap

So I'd just like to add that too. I'm not sure if anyone else feels kind of the same way. Yes, I do. I figured you'd be the one to say that too, Michael. Well, what's so interesting about the two presentations today is that they are really tying into my solo show that I'm doing in September. And, and I, even though I tend to approach my artwork from a non-human standpoint, obviously I'm presenting it to human beings. So, you know, I can't devoid myself of that. But from the pure physics, the pure philosophical, the pure mathematical elements that are in both of the presentations today, I just found really fascinating and uplifting.

Uli Ap

And that's why it's so cool to be here. And I think that's why I'm so proud to be part of this group, is that the diversity in the artists here is just phenomenal. And it's inspiring. So yeah, thank you. Yeah. No problem there. And thank you for our one presenter that's still left. Thank you, Uli, for presenting and talking and sharing about your thoughts and feelings behind the work that you do.

Uli Ap

I'll be honest too. I haven't experienced or come into contact with the kind of art that you're doing. Period. I don't think so. This is a first for me. And I'd very much like to try to experience it in person once, you know, once the opportunity presents itself again. Oh, Tommy asked. Oh, go ahead.

Uli Ap

I'll let you know. Thanks so much for tonight. I mean, tonight in my time today. Right. In your time was really, really lovely. I wish Paul stayed with us longer. I really enjoyed his presentation. And yeah, thank you so much for running those salons. I've watched all of them. They're fantastic. It's like really, really, I think it's like amazing the way people are connected here and the way you moderate the whole thing and people interact and share ideas. It's a really important community. And this way, I think that needs to be like go further and further and embrace more people.

Uli Ap

So thanks so much for having me here. Thank you for being here. And actually, you know what, we'll give all we'll give ourselves a round of applause. How about that? Is that cool with everyone? Sounds positive. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. To say something real quick. So I just confirmed one artist for the next salon, which is going to be on June 8th. It's Greg Little, who was at Bowling Green State University. He's in the Zoom right now when Patrick and I were graduate students there together doing our MFA's in computer art. And I'm excited to invite him to present. You know enjoyed the interview it was really cool to see you know a lot of you know the paintings and other kinds of work I had mostly been familiar with the vr stuff so I'm a painter myself really identified with that and just painted a link to greg's site in the chat if you guys want to check it out but I wanted to pump that up a little bit and you know we will have another slot open too so if anyone is interested in presenting or oh we do have lee lee musgrove wanted to present also next time so yeah he made sure to let me know before we even got started that he wanted to present so I think we got our two presenters thanks so much because I think the one thing it was a real pleasure interviewing greg and the thing is that I mean I knew him from like 1996 you know because he was teaching in my hometown in north canton ohio and the thing is I've gotten to know him you know is that I mean he comes from a very deep traditional background with this you know with this also this very high concept you know digital overlay a digital and technological overlay and you know yeah he was our graduate advisor but also on the other hand is that you know he was you know just a really great friend and colleague for many years beforehand and I really respect his practice so it'll be really good to see what he shares with everyone thank you guys that was that was nice and I look forward to it lee did you have any you have a link for lee as well ah I was actually going to look for that hold on give me one second I'm fairly fast when I want to be thanks so much calling for making it all happen it's just amazing community you're making building up here it's really lovely well I just kind of got the ball rolling so you know without all you guys it wouldn't be wouldn't be happening this is very true but I appreciate that and thanks for your presentation you know I thought it was a really interesting juxtaposition today between the two artists yeah all right guys it is now 3 58 p.m so we are winding down to the last literally last two minutes of the salon that being said it's been great the discussion has been great the presentations have been great all good all good all very good and with that being said I hope very much to be able to see some of you guys in two weeks for our next salon so we can you know keep having these great discussions and whatnot and talking about art and the things we care about so that fantastic looking forward to it yep thank you davante for taking the lead you know with the moderation and all of your input and efforts you know again the collab project going you know definitely muchas gracias on that no problem I like to think of myself as a fairly selfless individual this is all an extension of that like I like to give and I like to help out whenever and however I possibly can with what I've got so yeah thanks for having me all right guys we are going to be signing off on the next episode of the show off any second now so we'll go ahead and close out the recording in three two one and