lettre no 14.

Truth, beauty and a picture of you.

The emergence of digital technology, social media and now coupled with the emergence of AI, has been met with opposition from more traditional artists with an almost religious fervour. It is being cast as some sinister act by an aggressive agent, or a portent of an impending apocalypse,the current evidence of which includes fragile and decaying human relationships, and "fake" news or deep fake avatars.

For many people living in advanced and developed nations, the there also seems to be an awakening and realisation that the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century has largely failed to deliver the scientific advances and salvation we had been promised by our elders, leaders and politicians. Instead, it has compounded the pressures on finite natural resources and on the human fibre of our communities. Typically, this has been at the expense of less developed nations and people and whose resources and effort often provide the materials and labour to sustain global supply chains.

In particular, the fear of Ai has found resonance. not simply because of the possibility of an extinction event, but rather, as a deep fear response and an intuitive human distrust about the increased fusion of technologies - that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.

In response to this perceived violation, there has also been a range of popular artistic reactions across all artistic genres including a dialogue on disembodiment, on the fragmentation of identity, and in an echo from ancient times, a story about human exile from the state of nature..

For example, Abstract art has emerged at the forefront of modern art, because it dissolves the notion of truth. It simultaneously dismantles traditional structures of knowledge and at the same time props up individual perception and opinion structures. The same is evident in other areas of human artistic endeavour, from film noir to photography, to dance and with modern literature.

Culturally laid down norms and beliefs about what art should be and how art should look, or even what art means, fractures under the weight of information processing, Further, AI technology confronts us in much the same way as babies react when they see their own reflection for the first time.

AI allows us to create images of ourselves that look and sound like us, but that are not real. In the space of a few clicks or taps, even a thirteen year old can create an avatar of themselves, and if desired, they can dismember and replace limbs and sex organs or enhance and remove any other part of their appearance, physical capability or voice.

Coinciding with the reliance on digital technology, has been the rise and dominance of capitalism over every other alternative. Humans and human interaction have now largely become marketable or exchangeable items, little more than Human Resources. The paradigm of the marketplace is one where commodities, including humans are treated as commodities, are brought into relation with each other (associated and exchanged) as quantitative differences measurable by money.

This exchange, reinforced by the fourth estate (and including social media realms) also contains the premise of an indifference to qualitative differences between atomised individuals whose quantifiable aggregation forms the basis of political decision and modern value concepts. For example, democracy (one person - one vote).

However, instead of offering radically new options for valuing people, the current social media landscape is dominated by a few big players and whose words of view is fundamentally biased towards conservative Western values. Income streams are better preserved by maintaining traditional forms of intimacy, where "boy still meets girl" according to explicit and implicit social criteria - and where 'exchange' of personal information or an image is fundamental. Even where there is variance or protest from that, pending approval from censors, this alternative narrative only seeks to reinforce the very same behaviours and values that drive profit.

Perhaps then, what seems to be expressed as a fear by more traditional artists about digital technology, is not that at all. Rather, resistance to digital technology and AI is little more than an attempt to deconstruct new forms of art and systems of thought as a way to reveal how meaning is constructed, unstable, and influenced by power dynamics and cultural contexts.

More simplistically, a declaration that everything we know today is wrong, and yet - that what we know, albeit only from our own perspective, is still meaningful and valuable, and that there is still some kind of beauty in that.