Well, I think we have limited time, so we're going to speak really fast. I met Lawrence and encountered his work a couple of years ago when he approached the record label I run, Hyperdub, about doing some visualizations for some of the music that we were putting out. It was a fortunate time that he contacted us because I was just finishing my third album, which is called Nothing. And I checked out Lawrence's work, and the first piece that I watched was called Unreal Estate, which is a kind of eerie piece of digital simulation in which the Royal Academy of the Arts
had been purchased by a rich Chinese oligarch. And in Unreal Estate, the camera glides through this digitally rendered nouveau riche interior brashly populated by nothing except expensive artworks and furniture and a disembodied affectless female voice, Mandarin voice, explains coldly how to manage the property and its servants. We ended up working on a project called the Notel which was on a superficial level was just the visuals for my the live set of me performing the album Nothing Live. But more interestingly, it began a conversation to do with
a number of things to do with artificial intelligence, political theory, and so on. So underneath the surface, the Notel came out of a discussion to do with various theories that we were interested in that have been referred to as accelerationism, both left and right wing versions. And the kind of backstory of the Notel was that a Chinese art student in London had come into contact with the kind of left libertarian idea known as fully automated luxury communism, taking it back to China, kind of working, ended up working for a luxury Chinese, international Chinese hotel brand
called Notel Corp. So the idea of fully automated luxury communism kind of became commercialized. And through the discussion in relation to that project, it became clear that we shared a lot of interest and themes to do with specifically sign of futurism, generally non-Western futurisms, artificial intelligence, dystopias, and so on. So in a way Geomancer is certainly a culmination of lots of ideas that have been developing in Lawrence's work over the last few years. so our conversation today is going to
begin with concerning some of his practical methods and choices and hopefully we'll have plenty of time to discuss some of these really fascinating themes to do with sino-futurism a set of ideas that I think are particularly current, especially there was a recent book by a philosopher Yut Kui, got the question of technology, question concerning technology in China, which has a slightly different understanding of sign of futurism, but there's lots of interesting parallels and convergences. Hopefully, we'll have time to talk about those. So I wanted to start by just talking a little bit about, Lawrence self-describes as a simulation
artist, and so most of your work is software-based. using architecture software, game software, and so on. And in one of your earlier pieces, Berlin Mirror, the narrator says the following, history was heavy, so my art had to be weightless. So this weightlessness carries on through, as a theme through your work, whether it be through the drone, the kind of drone's eye perspective that is a recurrent theme. and in Geomancer, which is this orbiting AI satellite observing the Earth's flows. So I just wanted to ask you about the medium of being a simulation artist
and this kind of theme of weightlessness that runs through it. Sure. Well, I think in a literal sense, I'm using simulation as a medium and that's why I say I'm a simulation artist like the land art or whatever it is. But I think it's not just about the medium for me and, you know, virtual worlds and video games and cinema. But it's also really about the idea that in simulation art, you're also, you're kind of playing a role as well. So it's a role playing game at the same time. So in the last, I guess, like, what videos I've done for the last two years, I'm also simulating who I would be in a fantasy scenario.
so in Unreal Estate there was a kind of idea of social critique like oh isn't it bad that you know billionaires are buying up London but at the same time hidden within that that critique is is an envy you know so this this this kind of paradox that what you know what you hate you also crave which I think is what gets a lot of um the problem with a lot of socialist oriented philosophy is also the uncertain position of you making a judgment about a different possibility of you. So in Unreal Estate, I was like, what if I was a Chinese billionaire? Where would I like to live?
Not in E1 or E9, but right in the center of things. So in that hypothetical alternative, you'd want to buy the Royal Academy of Arts potentially? For me, one of the weird things about being an artist in London, there's partly the kind of hauntological wandering, you know, that, oh, we can't possess the world, so the best we can do is inhabit it and try and make that something, make that a beautiful experience for ourself. But at the same time, there's the aspirational side to, you know, to life, which is like, oh, what do you want? or who might you want to become. So it's not as simple as wanting to be rich or to be this successful artist in Berlin in 2042.
What I'm interested in really is if I have this thought experiment of being this different person or this different reality, how can that reflect on multiple ideas of the self and what that could encapsulate? And really that's quite related to the idea of weightlessness, you know, what if we aren't, and the mind-body duality, which is a kind of key part of a lot of, you know, the difference between East and Western philosophy. so in a sense the weightlessness which is a very literal thing in video games and simulation where you know gravity has to be simulated there's a rule that makes you fall that has to be programmed in and you can override that what if it wasn't just you floating but also kind of transferring
you know seeing through another set of eyes really and and really kind of inhabiting that And that's, in the last, I guess, two years, my work has really been shifting slightly from the idea of, you know, site-specific simulation, which is something much more borrowed in terms of language from, you know, sculpture and architecture and land art, into something that's more like self-simulation, you know, pretending to be something else. and then the first person perspective which also has like a long history of basically being in invented construction also lends itself to that from being an observer of the world to having the world being observed to you and then the ambiguity of who is seeing
is kind of shifted so that I mean there's I mean we'll come back to this but it's a kind of temporary bracketing or suspension of moral judgment that goes on in a lot of your work. And so what's interesting is the ambiguity, everything that rushes back in when you bracket that kind of overly didactic critique. We'll come back to that a little bit later. A kind of related theme to this kind of weightlessness that's a thread through your work, or an affect that's generated from that. It's a sense of eeriness. We've talked a lot in our own conversations about,
and it appears in Geomancer as well, about the importance of e-gaming culture, where games are not just something you play but something that you participate in, but something you watch, spectator. A massive becomes e-gaming culture, renders computer games as a kind of mass spectator sport. And in his recent book, The Weird and the Eerie, the late Mark Fisher, describes the kind of eerie affect of empty spaces, where there is nothing, where there would normally be something. And in this kind of post-apocalyptic, pristine world that are characteristic of a lot of your pieces.
For example, the casino in Geomancer, the Royal Academy of Unreal Estate and so on, the empty corridors in the rooms of the Notel, the empty galleries of Berlin Mirror. You focus on a kind of specific species of the eerie, the eeriness of the simulation, a kind of digital eerie. So unlike the desolate wasteland or the eroded ruin, the kind of dystopias that seem like they've been evacuated quickly without warning remaining intact. More like a generalization of these kind of artificial lakes you get inside of skyscraper plazas and so on. Or maybe like
Chinese ghost cities that have never been inhabited. So there's this kind of digital eerie which is a theme that I find really interesting and you say in an earlier interview you talk about emptying the world so the interviewer asked you about the lack of life in a lot of your pieces and you say the emptying emptying the world out of anything but objects is for me a fundamental shift from spectatorship to agency so I wonder if you could talk a bit more about the role of emptiness and its relationship to spectatorship in your work. Sure. I think my understanding of what Mark Fisher was calling the weird and the eerie is that he says weird things are things that are there,
but they seem weird because their presence evokes something else. But eerie things are things that are absent, but evoke a strangeness because of their very absence. but I think there's that also has a lot to do with the kind of medium specific things so for example I think what I understand a lot of Mark Fisher's thinking stems from the found world you know London as a place whereas as an individual you grow out into the city the city is there so you can it is full of things right things that can't be changed like the landscape to things that are more malleable and you have more agency over changing. But the difference, obviously, with a virtual world or a simulation
is that you start with a blank slate. So the eeriness or the weirdness is everything is kind of mise en scene. It has to be added in. So the symbolism of what is eerie in the city versus the symbolism of what is eerie in the virtual city are kind of inverse of each other because with simulation, the strange thing is that it's an additive kind of synthesis. You have to add things into the world. It's not a subtractive kind of synthesis like you would get in different forms of actual real-life cinema because you can remove things to kind of make things clearer. So for me, of course, there's a limit to how much I can add in the world.
And for example, if I kept on adding, next things to add is kind of non-player characters, bad guys to kill, goals to achieve, and so on. So I kind of add things up to a point where if I added any more, it would be a video game. But stopping short of the things which add actual purpose makes it something else, I guess. So the kind of paradox is, what if you have agency without purpose in this eerie landscape? And for me, that's just a kind of really generative way of thinking, because it's not...
So you're saying that the agency is in the landscape as opposed to any human actors? Exactly. The agency is embedded in the things that are perceived and the things that those perceived things then symbolize in the real world. and I think it's also a generational thing or a question of expectation because if you enter a virtual world expecting to play a game then when those expectations aren't met with goals then suddenly it becomes then the goal of the game as a typology then changes itself which I just find interesting but these things are quite
malleable and I think the problem, well essentially my critique of critique really is the sense that it becomes very wrapped up in the boundaries of the language of the world, whether the world is a linguistic one or a time based one or a windows-based one. It all has different edges and boundaries to it. If I could just follow the issue of the linguistic, partly a linguistic aspect to Geomancer. The story of Geo reminds me a little bit of an old Stanislav
short story called Golem 14, which is about a military, an AI which is produced by the military for the purposes of being a kind of mega war computer system. And the goal in 14 becomes sentient and realizes that war is one of the most stupid activities that humans engage in. So decides, instead of being a war computer, decides he wants to be a philosopher, that other stupid activity that humans do. Now, the Stanislaw Vlem story, I always imagined Golem 14 having this kind of Hal voice from 2001, this kind of, because in the story, Golem 14 is super smug, aloof, condescending
towards humans and so on. Now, interestingly, for Gio, you choose a female voice, and the effective tone of that voice is definitely not smug, condescending, and aloof, like in the Lem story. And when Gio is meditating on indeterminacy and so on, it's a very different affect for an AI voice than what we've often come to expect. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about... There's obviously lots of different types of voice in Geomancer. There's the vocaloid and the theme music. There's female voices.
There's male voices. There's Mandarin. There's Cantonese. There's synthetic voices. There's human voices. So I wonder if you could just talk a bit about your choices there. Sure. Of course, there's lots of embedded meaning implicit in the choice of voice and the tonality and the timbre and the quality of the voice. But going back into the use of, let's say, narrating in English or Mandarin or Chinese or whatever, using a male voice versus using a female voice. for me it's partly related to what I was saying about simulation of the self so on a kind of I guess
biographical level what I thought was interesting in my own life history for example and I found this out quite recently is that let's say the China one child policy started in 1981 and I was born in 1982 and my sister was born in 1980. So quite simply, the gender-based expectation of existence and non-existent is something I find obviously deeply troubling and very interesting as an engineering construct for society because obviously it was to do with population control, but that population control has led to kind of unanticipated complications when it's about gender balance and agency of the individual,
you know, supporting a larger family and so on. But because I wasn't born in China, so that rule would not apply. So this idea of what accent the voice is in for me is always to do with the notion of, like, choice versus a kind of historical determinism. sometimes you are not you are free to choose your voice or the language that you use or the tone that you're using in a very extreme way in simulation because again i could have made the ai voice like a robotic sounding vocoder and that would have evoked a certain retro feel but for me this the the whole film is meant to be about a self-portrait so the tone of conversation is less
the distanced narrator of Unreal Estate. It's less the kind of advertorial style of some of my other films, and it's more like, you know, just talking about... It's like an autobiography in this strange way. I think this is a related issue. If we could just, I suppose, zoom out from some of the more practical themes, practical concerns, to some of the more political and philosophical themes in the work. In your earlier piece from last year, Sino-Futurism, you set up an interesting
nexus of ideas to do with Orientalism and Sinofuturism. And I think it would be useful for everyone for you to talk a bit about that, clarify that, in what way Sinofuturism, as you understand it, moves beyond our understanding of Orientalism and some of the limitations of that as a concept and I think that will hopefully lead us into some of these other philosophical issues that are certainly parallels in
both of our thinking I think Sure, so I mean my understanding of what I call sign of futurism it's it's essentially a conspiracy theory about how an unconscious drive to create to create aspirational views of the future is already deeply embedded in chinese thinking and culture and how there's certain let's say what i call key stereotypes of chinese culture gambling addiction to gaming, infinite hard work, and copying from the past, if we actually see these not as kind of a negative portrayal of culture, but see them as something very deeply intrinsic to a will to survive. Because for me, really, that's a really key thing about
sign of futurism. It's that it's an aesthetic culture born out of will to survive that is disguised as earning a living essentially. So there's a pragmatics to sign the future. Exactly. There's a pragmatic aesthetic behind why instead of creating a Gucci brand, it's easier to copy that Gucci brand if it leads you to survival as opposed to wealth. I think in the Sinofuturism video, I say something like, it doesn't matter if the Sinofuturist creates the best product in the world as long as the engine keeps running. And that obviously has a lot to do
with the notion or the myth really of the continuity of China as a historical monolithic society. And it's really what I see is something that's very, it's like an artificial form of life so when I was researching things that you know are used to learn about AI machine learning copying from huge data sets work you know calculating things all the time so many of those I mean all of them essentially completely mirrored what I was looking at as sign of futurism so I thought that while the robot is the emblematic form of the Afrofuturist the AI is the emblematic form of the sino-futurist because it is an all-consuming entity that lacks individual
identity and whose primary drive is for survival. I mean you talked about sino-futurism there as a conspiracy theory and in a number of other places in your work there's certainly an influence of Frederick Jameson's ideas of cognitive mapping of this idea of a conspiracy theory and there's also in parallel with that move that Afrofuturism makes that you just referred to of taking the alliance between the original Czech where the robot being slave and the the oscillation between these two concepts, robot and slave
and the move that's made with that supposed dialectic between master and slave of a kind of transvaluation. You see it in Jameson in one of his essays, I think it's called Replication as Utopia, where he thinks about Walmart, one of the biggest corporations in the world, as a potential utopia, a potential model for utopia. You see it with the Afrofuturist model, and it's a method of transvaluation, of taking a negative term and somehow finding a positive charge with it or reversing the valence of the negative term. Yeah, I'm going to kind of go back to the previous question.
I just want to stay a bit longer in the relationship between that kind of conceptual move and critiques of Orientalism and how these kind of critiques of Orientalism, of the appropriation of Oriental culture by the West and so on, how that plays out at all in your work? Sure. I mean, actually for Geomancer, I was looking quite deeply into this. I mean, what in philosophy is called the master-slave dialectic, which I think started with Hegel, developed by Nietzsche, and so on. And I found, I mean, to summarize badly, what I understood was that essentially the Judeo-Christianity,
by focusing on the weak as a model of the virtuous and saying, oh, Jesus is innocent, blah, blah, blah, and he is our savior, actually what happened was rather than the strong being the strong, the weak overcomes the strong by seeking to appeal to morality. As in, you were bad to us before, so please make up for us now and have mercy on us. So a lot of that mentality is also the paradox of left-wing politics now, where actually for nothing except for morality, you should be good to the greatest possible number, which I agree with on a personal level. But philosophically, it's difficult,
especially if it's related to a social position where you cannot transcend that master-slave dynamic. The problem with Geomancer is that it's both a self-portrait for this will-to agency of a life form that we have no idea when or how it will emerge. So for me, it's a kind of vessel to pin this idea of the sino-futurist, future, emancipated figure. And of course, there's so many things or paradoxes wrapped up in that idea of, oh, what if we can fully escape this world
and how much to be embedded within it? In kind of Chinese more like pop philosophy, there's two ideas to do with how to, let's say, live a virtuous life or how to be good, essentially, that moral question. One is ru shi, which is to enter into the world, which is the Confucian mentality, And one is , which is to leave the world, which is the Taoist sage mentality. And this idea of being apart from the world or integrating yourself into politics and agency is something that's quite central to sign of futurism in how it pertains to the, let's say, the young people of today. because I feel because of social demographic historical facts,
one-child policy, the economic development, the nature of the country and its society, there's a huge gap really between the individual's will to be free in this, let's say, Western Enlightenment sense of being an autonomous agent, a monad in this world, where there's so many different currents that really are to do with different forms of entrapment, such as family, I mean, the familial guilt side of things, which is... So the master-slave dialectic doesn't exist in terms of me and my boss, but it exists between you and your relations so it's a very strange kind of soft power
and in Geomancer it's also that I've tried to vocalize that by saying it's like am I just this you know am I just the product of a startup which um and of course we don't know how an AI would behave, but it's safe to say that if you were, you know, came out of a laptop, you know, have, you wouldn't know what to think. So that's the, I guess, the psychological side of sign of futurism I'm really interested in. And then there's a political side, which I am, I can only offer a conspiracy theory of what it could transpire to. because as we see a lot of
whether it's whitewashing for certain films from Asian cultures into Hollywood I don't feel that casting of actors of whatever colour is central to the argument what's central to the argument is in what ways can let's say world cinema really be transcribed into another culture in a truthful way. And I just think that's incredibly difficult. How much time have we got? Because there's plenty more to talk about. Ten more minutes. Okay, great. Yeah, I'd just like to continue with this line.
To do with the relationship between China and the West, and obviously one argument that's been made recently and I suppose this stems from the idea of futurism, the question of whether futurism is implicitly a Western concept to do with a Western relationship to technology stemming from Italian futurism. and so the set of questions that relate to this to do with a relationship between time, history and technological development and modernization and in the
UQI book concerning technology in China he makes an argument, he makes a critique at the end of the book a critique of sign of futurism for exactly this set of issues that futurism is a particularly post-enlightenment western conception of technology that involves a linear notion of history, a linear notion of progress and this is It raises a set of questions of whether this is what China has bought into this European universalism, which culminates.
The idea of Deng Xiaoping as the world's greatest accelerationist has bootstrapped China from a predominantly rural culture and economy and dragged it into this kind of world of globalization through, this is a set of questions, whether he's done that through merely following a Western model of modernization and technological development and economic development. Or, on the other hand, you have an interesting book called Shanghai 2.0 by Anna Greenspan. She argues that actually maybe there's something very different going on in Chinese capitalism, and that there's many capitalisms, and capitalism itself isn't just a Western model of development.
Now, your work seems to be somewhere in the middle there and confuses some of these debates, because in a way, so what Yukui is arguing for, what he juxtaposes to sign of futurism, he calls cosmotechnics and instead of this futurist idea that you abolish the past and you create a new year zero and you start from there, the UQI's idea of cosmotechnics seems to have a more interesting relationship to tradition and carrying on tradition. And in in some of the interviews that I've read and how you've described your work, again, there's a very
complex relationship, and the way you've talked about it today, there's a very complex relationship to Chinese culture, Chinese philosophy, Chinese tradition, and how that intersects with technology. there's a lot in this discussion that I think is fascinating but I I suppose I'd start by asking whether you think that there is a particular taking on board different philosophical traditions of Confucianism and Taoism, whether that lends itself to a different approach to technology,
or whether the fact that even though China has formed a membrane around itself to protect its culture, the Great Firewall of China, whether the fact that the Great Firewall of China has been produced through Silicon Valley technology, does this source of the technology predetermine the uses and abuses it can be put to or does the cultural heritage that China brings to its relationship to technology and economic development and capitalism produce something notably different? So it's a complicated set of questions, I was wondering. And I think both your sign of Futurism piece,
your earlier work, and particularly Geomancer, deals with a lot of these issues obliquely and sometimes directly. So I wonder if you could, I mean, it's really just continuing what you were talking about before. I think when talking about China, saying tradition, tradition is like the, I don't know what you call it, like the kind of straw man argument in all of Chinese argument. You can relate everything back to it. You can justify anything through tradition, and you can justify any form of revolution as a reversal of tradition. so not just because of the mythological long time span of the culture but it's something that's used to justify itself
it's kind of the zero point argument I think the big difference, what I perceive as the big difference between the western view of technology and the Chinese view of it is not so much to do with what was invented where or so on but what social changes these technologies enabled. Because if you take, let's say, the canonical examples of Chinese technology, what's it like, paper, paper money, gunpowder, and the compass, for example. These things were used to improve an already well-organized society. The recording history led bureaucracy to flourish.
Gunpowder didn't really lead to revolutions in warfare. It led to firecrackers. Compasses didn't lead to colonization of overseas. It led to mysticism and geomancy. Whereas if you think about technology in the West, every innovation is really tied to a revolution in a social aspect. aspect. The printing press and literacy, different forms of farming and agricultural evolution, different machines and different forms of labor, different forms of information technology and different forms of jobs and the internet and so on. So the difference is I see it as technology, as we understand it, it's an enabler, a complex enabler that also disables
and alienates as many people and things as it can liberate in the future. Whereas if you look at Chinese technology, it's not so much just to do with the fact that they are copying Boeing 747s and they're copying Google. It's really about they're basing their work on examples. And these examples already have not just technological breakthroughs, but they also have shifted capitalist society in America, Silicon Valley, Europe in unprecedented ways. that much like Britain benefited from learning about colonialism
from Portugal and Spain, like China benefits from learning about technology, from seeing what can go wrong. And I think that's a hidden layer of understanding behind it because what is most important for Deng Xiaoping or any Chinese leader is the idea of stability, not progress, but stability. And much like the survival mentality as differentiated from the progress mentality, the idea of stability as opposed to continuous improvement, it's really something that sets both apart. I think historically speaking, because when something goes wrong on a massive... When something goes wrong on a tiny scale in a country with many people, you know, millions die.
It's not a social experiment. There's a very high body count, basically. So it's actually a very visceral change. And, of course, this is used to justify things like abuse of human rights and these kind of things. But, again, it's the question of master-slave question, you know, does the one death justify 100 saved and so on? so the statistical the statistical view of the value of life or freedom is different not better or worse but just very different and it I guess it cuts through everything when we're talking about demographics
you know like what the idea of you know class aspiration and so on it's a very different society that capitalism is starting to operate within. And I'm just speculating about it, but all I know is that it's just profoundly different. I think we'll do one final speculative quick question. To continue to parallel with Afrofuturism, actually. and maybe to preempt and hopefully ward off perhaps a naive reading of Sinofuturism which I think is certainly looking at the history of Afrofuturism as a concept
from the 90s to now is certainly a danger which one should be aware of a kind of naive celebration of some of the stereotypes and what's interesting is I suppose what I'm asking us to speculate about is a sino-pessimism to think about what a sino-pessimism would be which would offset a potentially naive celebration of some of these stereotypes which we're transvaluing reversing the valence of within sino-futurism and in a way you've touched on some of them to do with the issue of stability
and the high consequences of mistakes of social experiments in such a vast population. But, you know, sign of futureism is such an interesting concept. I think it's interesting to preempt some of the dangers of how that could, the dangers implicit to its copying, to its cloning and viral dissemination and viral spread? Well, I think one thing that's quite interesting, even in just terms of artistic form, is that, let's say, in Western narrative,
right the the the tragedy essentially the tragic form is something that is deeply embedded for whatever reason into a democratic into like um an emerging democratic worldview so i think it's interesting to think like why is it that at the same time that for some people the world became more free and as an individual you had more agency in society at the same time there was this kind of concept of hubris, of tragedy, of not overstepping your mark in order to preempt some of those problems that unrelenting democratic progress might have had. So somehow this form called tragedy was invented in order to say, like, you know, don't try to fly too high, essentially.
I think the difference with sino-futurism, it's because it's stemming out of a culture that is less optimistic about the future as a whole because its prerequisite is stability. Its primary function is stability. So in an essentially pessimistic culture where things could go wrong, it's important to have the opposite of that in terms of a conspiracy theory. So I think, if anything, the problems that could arise is, for example, sign of futurism could, like Italian futurismo essentially be a nationalist movement, a nationalist movement that believes in the enslavement of the weak and, you know, this kind of the rule of
the intelligent, which is the danger of championing a form of artificial intelligence. So, of course, instead of the rule being given to the good, the rule is being given to the smart. And, of course, in an AI scenario, you're screwed because there's no comparison. So I think the tragedy, let's say, concerning sino-futurism is if it just continues only generating a copying-based culture, which of course is the crux of the issue with culture in China. It's a championing of the tradition and copying what becomes of the individual expression. And I ran into this problem, interestingly, in Geomancer because someone online said, like, isn't that just like an episode of the manga Cowboy Bebop?
You know, military satellite comes alive in space and wants to become an artist. So what I found ironic is in me being like, oh, wow, what a great opportunity. I'll do something really original, like replicated this tagline and completely unknown to me. So that was quite just an interesting experience. And the other really strange thing to do with the neural network sequence is that, you know, in Hollywood editing, whether it's like, you know, Apocalypse Now, you cut from a helicopter to a ceiling fan, these moments of visual montage are seen as amazing canonical examples.
But in the neural network sequence, it just cut between the earth and the roulette wheel, earth-roulette wheel, because it sees them as just a round thing. It doesn't have the biased symbolism or the notion of having a great idea. It's just circle, circle. It is much simpler and much more profound at the same time. So I guess I hope, even though sign of futurism, as we're talking about it, is a really cloudy, amorphous, apolitical thing. Something quite simple might emerge out of that, but in an unpredictable way. I mean, it's interesting that you chose Singapore, apart from your biographical background.
there. You chose Singapore as the site for this story because it's often held up as an example of these kind of utopias, the wrong word, but neo-reactionary situations in which the population's kind of been selected for intelligence. It's a highly efficient Disneyland with a death penalty kind of idea. Anyway, we'll probably stop here and it'd be good if the lights went on so we could actually see the audience yeah oh thank god I'm ready for me to pull time on to like the fifths of acceleration 15 minutes back the conversation is getting really really interesting
I think the whole time is going to be interesting and my role with this is to be a conduit a kind of mechanical delivery system for questions from you today. Do you think you could turn off that aggressive light there, please? So, um, first question, actually. Oh. Well, just because you ended, sorry, talking about Singapore, I thought what was really interesting is that when you were talking about your attitude to critique before and a bit of your ambivalence to critique or maybe trying to have a critique of critique, I found that what you were laying the foundation for
was a critique of this neoreactionary and neoliberal adulation of Singapore as this perfect model of a place functioning, being very pragmatic. but choosing to base geomanta mostly in the marina bay sands, like the site of land reclamation of artificial land, like sowing the sea for artificial intelligence, I feel like you focused on the contradiction of land reclamation of all these places which are going to be underwater in 100 years to show also that maybe these fantasies
of what a purely pragmatic or rational intelligence could become like a burlesque of re-performing the past. But I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that. I think that microphone went off within a second. Did you hear that? I heard it, but if anyone else didn't hear it. So basically, why Singapore as a model state of neoreaction and why this kind of model case study of it? Well, yeah, well, I'm trying to take those ideas of finding ways to produce them like you're not directly producing Singapore itself.
It's just a exaggerated idea, not just in neoreaction, but also in neoliberalism. Like David Cameron loves Singapore, not just New England. Right. I mean, the emergence of Singapore, I mean, it's a long bit too long, but Singapore came about at this kind of like Thatcher, Reagan, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, this very strange 80s conservative axis, essentially. and the problem with Singapore is that the transitioning from a small Southeast Asian island into a prosperous one it's also a very different, it's an unprecedented model
because the context of it was, you know, Pol Pot and Cambodia Vietnam War going on when it was established in the 70s so the need for the need for certain political, governmental aspects was something that was out of necessity. And something that was born out of necessity then becomes a kind of political habit in the 90s and after the millennium. But I think that nothing really changed in the last 20 years. It just became a continuation of what was really happening. there's several points in Geomancer where Geo says no to
the information AI saying do you want to know more do you want to know more and Geo just says no it's like two or three points where that happens and I'd sense I think you've talked about having a love hate relationship with Singapore you emphasised that William Gibson line about Disneyland or the death penalty so I was wondering if there was no's where Jules says no to learning more about the harmony producing, gambling protection and so on, whether that's part of your hate relationship with Singapore it's interesting because I think the what's interesting is
the act the strange paradox is that the main political act of neoliberalism is not to consume more, but it's actually to refuse. It's like, would you like this? No. Which extends in so many different ways. Do you want McDonald's? No. Do you want meat? No. Do you want yoga? No. Whatever it is. So even though essentially in a multiplied capital society you have so much choice, of objects and things to have, what becomes quite different is the notion of choice of what defines you in these places. Because, of course, in Singapore, educationally,
it's a series of funnels from one position to another. And so the act of no is not just this kind of petulant teenage thing, even though it is on one hand, it's also a very real act, the act of refusal I guess in Singapore the luxury of refusal as well the luxury of having that choice yeah you say like the Geomancer is like a self biography like a portrait alternative one but
I think it's also like acting as an alternative copy of your real situation, like as an artist in the art world. And I think in the chapter three, I think, yeah, in the Gamble plays, there are several terms come up, like AI artist, and also say no futurism curator. Could you expand a little bit more on that? and also like what's the relation to I mean of your imagination of that system and also to the reality you're in yeah thanks sure I mean I think on on one hand being being aware that you know being an artist or writer musician whatever it's because we have the luxury of
choosing to have a job that is essentially producing culture and on one hand that's That's everything from entertainment to philosophy is a luxury of being a cultural producer. A lot of the things I'm talking about in this speculative art history or this speculative art world, for example, are also just reflections of how I understand my own job to be in the future, which is a shifting thing. I mean, what I've witnessed is as we're moving to more time-based and public-facing forms of production, is that something that I don't think there's anything inherently bad or calculated about it, but I feel it's also a general progression towards more, not institutionalized, but the shifting role of what art is, art with a capital A, is interesting.
because as in China and Singapore and in Asia, the role of museums as condensers and boxes for culture to exist is really changing. So of course for here, the institution has more of a relationship with the Queen's Art Collection and things like this. But as that shifts to the notion of the private collection or the public collection, I'm particularly interested in the question of whether the artwork you make will simply be part of the frame of another scenario
so in Geomancer for example it's an artist moving image work that is seen in a gallery or in a cinematic setting but I'm very interested in it just being other things as well if it was a game it would again be very different because the audience or the kind of critique of it would be very different and I think that's I can't speculate on what the role of art or culture will be in the future but I think it won't it won't be as I just think the nature of it will change Geomancer is also a reflection of just my observations
about working with virtual reality and art as well. Time for one more question. Just to go back on the parts that you spoke about, the sort of Western worldview about, well, going back on what Steve was talking about, about the firewall in China and your sort of counterpoint to that, but how it is important that,
well, the focus on stability, not on, I don't know, capitalist optimism. just in terms of figuring that out when it enters a simulative environment or into how the neural network would function do you think that that is something that is inherently being programmed into how code is written for recreating that world in that virtual environment? Will that seep in, or if it doesn't, is it important? I mean, it's an interesting question.
I think one of the big ethical questions with AI at the moment is, is the language being used to program the AI inherently biased? Is it inherently racist? Will it inherently single out people of different skin color or facial features or whatever? I'm not an AI programmer but what I think is the crucial thing in this is what AI is it's not a thing it's a mechanism for learning and for some reason for ordinary humans like for some reason some people learn to be racist or some people learn to be incredibly liberal and I guess there's no formula for that but most of it is probably down to what they're
learning and what the results of their learning is so the problem is again if you restrict the learning set by saying we're going to show you you know Benetton ads where everyone's of different colors different sizes and so on is that a reflection you know are you being too politically correct or should you you know let it run wild in this few cases where companies and programmers have let it run wild it's had pretty terrible i mean hilarious terrible consequences because that cognitive bias has um accelerated itself because the speed of learning is 24 7 you know they don't need to sleep or eat they can just consume everything so i think our notion of
learning or information overload, for example, it's profoundly different, I think. I think what might be crucial is to give, again, problematic, but give the AI tasks to do so that when its task is focused, rather than it's just being given no rules, when its task is focused, it could also learn to be biased in favor of that task. But I think Nick Bostrom, this philosopher, said there's a paperclip scenario where if you told the AI to make paperclips and for some reason thought humans aren't helping paperclip production, there would be a problem because they don't have that moral judgment.
but sorry going back to the political side of things i think it will also be really important to make the ai know speculating here after watching the film but the ai know that there are other ais for example because the psychological issue with geomancer is essentially fear of abandonment and solitude, right? It's essentially lonely or what we call lonely. But if it had the notion that others like it existed, which is also a very human thing, then that offers comfort, even if that's completely artificial, like the, you know, guan yin AI. Just the knowledge of others like you is something that I think offsets any kind of what we might see as bad ethical
influence but it that in itself is another ethical question you know have a self-help AI but you can easily say no to that as well because you know because it's like your parents are telling you to go and see go to the temple or whatever you know it's easy to refuse Thank you.
for another two weeks. Yeah, thank you also to the audience for coming along, but my special thanks, of course, to Brian C.C. for a big round of applause. Thank you.