Moreover, algorithms learn and generalize from labeled training data. To provide the labeled training data, a growing industry has emerged that lets people manually organize datasets for machines to digest and learn (Huang 2019). In some ways, a system of machine learning and AI is emerging that resembles that of children at an early age: The machines go to school, learn, and receive special care, while humans are increasingly left in the dark.
The best part is that the machines can learn using a variety of methods, while the methods in real schools are becoming more and more limited. Another system of learning is to mimic human relationships in the workplace. It is an old school method, with the difference that the machines work consistently after observing the processes.
"In the case of Cobalt Robot, humans play a critical role as they handle all the cases that robots cannot deal with. But as robots continue to become smarter, they may come to different conclusions than their human counterparts." (Huang 2019)
So these are the questions that arise today in the dynamic between robots and humans in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Algorithms "collect data of workers and make (semi-)automated decisions to incentivize worker behaviors in real-time." (Huang 2019)
The workers involved are frustrated because the algorithm knows a lot about them, but they are stuck in an opaque terrain without knowing enough about the algorithm. "In a recent study, Lior Zalmanson and Robert W. Gregory found that Uber drivers feel that the app knows a lot about them but they have little understanding about how the algorithm works and makes decisions." (Huang 2019)
Yuxi Lu (2018) notes that our relationship with intelligent machines is changing as machines increasingly move from the role of passive objects to the position of active subjects.
She exposes one of the gurus of machine rebellion and the acquired subject position, quoting Timothy Morton (2018) in Being Ecological, who states, resisting anthropocentrism does not mean hating humans and wishing we were extinct. "What it means is seeing how we humans are included in the biosphere as one being among others" (Morton 2018, 21).
She continues, "Similarly, machine-centered design is not about privileging machines over humans, but how to better understand machines and promote a more equal relationship between us. Instead of separation and making it aline, we should pursue alliance and making kin." (Lu 2018)
Alliances?
This is not a problem for machines, I would say, but for us, as the demands made of intelligent machines for more respect, communication and trust, etc., are fine, but racialized humans (not the white supremacist, to be clear), are out of this equation.
Black Lives Matter presents this poignantly in public spaces, their lives are an outcome of centuries of systematic structural discrimination, racism, class dispossession.
What Art has to do with this?
Artists are also part of this machinery, working as part of a stratified, art market-specialized industry, or to put it more directly, for capital. We move from physically structured space to mentally structured space and then find ourselves, as if on a Moebius strip, in traumatically real, socio-political urban space.
For an important change can be seen in the realm of art and mass media and digitally produced art. Mass media art production, so-called consumer art production, has become production for the market. It is an industrial production of art linked to digital media technology.
Digital art projects that play with ideas of agents and communities as art market products are not necessarily productive or subversive. Although they present their works as corporate organizations (reflecting capitalist structures and playing with art market actions), a variety of groups also embrace the brand, world maps of influence, maps of the division of capital and influence, charts showing which large multinational corporations invest in them, and so on. But although they cynically and dramatically use corporate images, corporate names, and visual signs of real art market brands, they are already part of the digital art industry system.
It is necessary to note that contemporary neoliberal capitalism operates on two levels. One is the domination of territories and the accumulation of goods and services, and the other is an intensified process of governmentality exercised through subjectification. In both cases, the process of subjectification has the characteristic of a state of exception; it is presented as an extreme process of subjectification that corresponds to the demarcation of the current transformation of contemporary society as a whole to a normalized state of exception.
In their essay "Past Futures: Extreme Subjectification. The Engineering of the Future and the Instrumentalization of Life," Rozalinda Borcilă and Cristian Nae (2005) show that the globalization of capitalism is not just about the conquest of new markets, but is a configuration that is the very medium for the production of human relations. The dubious thing is that this humanity is reconfigured on a daily basis, and that only some are considered human, while others will never be able to "emancipate" themselves enough to be considered sufficiently human by the neoliberal capitalist machine.
The result is that the alienation of human relations, which was a situation that motivated generations of critical thought (for example, the Frankfurt School), is now just part of the conditions of the spectacle within neoliberal global capitalism that presents alienation as a sensualized, fancy, luxurious, "sexy" form of subjectivity in the Western realm (aided by the technologization of communication and the aestheticization of radical individualization).
Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid
Tester, 2005 (fragment)
Mini DV, 14.00 min, produced by Arteleku, San Sebastian, Spain, 2005
Tester from 2005 talks about current processes of labour, capital and resistance. We shot it as part of a collaborative project with five artists from Berlin, Vienna, Johannesburg, Lima and Ljubljana and the group Rodriguez org. from the Basque Country.
We all became "nodes" in an artificially created network to discuss issues of space, the architecture of power and life (including food), and problems with contemporary institutions of art and global capital. Each of us functioned as a node in the project.
A node represents a particular member of a particular community that serves as a link to the other nodes. This kind of vocabulary is related to the notion of wireless connectivity in a community. Each of the nodes in this project was like an old computer that allows the other nodes to be sporadically connected. As Susana Noguera notes, there are communication frequencies (hubs) in the microwave range, 2.4 GHz, which does not pose any legal problems and thus allows testing of freely accessible devices.
O-OH ...cryptocurrencies & NFT
Classic cryptocurrencies aren't the only thing investors are throwing their money at these days, as the value of selling artwork whose proof of ownership is tied to chains of blocks has practically increased in just over a year. The basis of cryptocurrency is the binding of instances to a blockchain that confirms their authenticity and ownership – so-called irreplaceable tokens, or NFT (non-fungible tokens).
Unlike the blocks of classic cryptocurrencies, NFT art products are unique, like a signed document that proves the owner's ownership of the artwork. This is also what gives them monetary value, as it is often hard to tell how much intrinsic value the works themselves have, and the biggest buyers in the space are those who have invested the most in NFT art.
We are witnessing spiraling financial capitalism, not just an irrational attribution of value to something that is questionable in content. All that matters is the form of ownership which clearly proves that capitalist value is purely a social construct (everything depends on the relationship with capital), further NFTs are based on extreme waste of energy as is the whole structure of mining cryptocurrencies.
Another important point is that "the value" of NFT media art is captured through direct relations to only one thing: private property, the signature, the fetish of the old 19th century bourgeois institution of art. It is a fetishization of private property amidst the fraud of contemporary financialization.
Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid
Labyrinth, 1993 (fragment)
Betacam SP PAL, 11.45 min., produced by TV Slovenija, 1993
In Labyrinth, artificially created surrealist images based on paintings by Magritte, such as Girl Eating a Bird (1927) and The Lovers (1928), are juxtaposed with documentary clips showing the lives of Bosnian refugees, mostly Muslims, in the refugee centers set up on the outskirts of Ljubljana during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995). The video contextualizes what Giorgio Agamben calls the paradigm of the contemporary global city, which is not the polis – that is, the public square as a space of protest and democracy – but rather a concentration camp, which also appears in numerous contemporary versions: the refugee collection center, transitional houses for foreigners, shelters for asylum seekers, etc.
The video Labyrinth is "accelerated" from the start, using technology to speed up video images. But our aim was not to recreate a Chaplinesque farce or pantomime; quite the opposite: we wanted to make the intensity of the emotions even more prominent. We know that bodies in a video cannot be separated from technology and that our ability to intensify emotions corresponds to the acceleration of the body through video technology. Clearly, tremendous effects can be achieved when the linearity of time is technologically reversed.
Sometimes this is done by running the videotape "backward"...
or "fast-forwarding" it, or by playing it fast or slow, which we can all do by simply pressing a button on the VCR, as the best illustration of our feelings and thoughts.
Running backward is not the same as running in neutral!
The central message of Labyrinth is the completely manufactured, artificial temporality of the body. At the end of the millennium, the body is in the throes of fear, pain, and war – besieged and de-centered. Above all, the body is an ephemeral physical-material fact. A credit-card-sized microprocessor can hijack its materiality – at the touch of a button; we can attach ourselves to any high-tech device we desire. Like all images used and processed by technology, from photography on, every video is an artificial creation.
Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid
Bilocation, 1990 (fragment)
Betacam SP PAL, 12.06 min, produced by TV Slovenija, 1990
The human algorithm: In our video Bilocation. (1990), Šmid and I almost prophetically predicted the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Balkan wars that followed. It is about the juxtaposition of pages that seem to be cut with small scissors.
There is an interpretive struggle over these "little scissors," but they are not manicure scissors (i.e., the idea that Bonitzer's "scissors" merely create tactile effects in the video), but the tactics and politics of the medium of video!
In Bilocation, we used documentary footage filmed by Slovenian television during the 1989 riots in Kosovo (when, as seen in the video, the Albanian majority population fought with bare hands against Yugoslavian People's army – essentially the Serbian army – which responded with tanks and tear gas); this we juxtaposed with the fictional world of our synthetic video images.
Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid
Moments of Decision, 1985
U-matic transferred on Betacam SP PAL, 13.59 min., coproduced by SKUC-Forum, Ljubljana, and Marjan Osole Max, Ljubljana; produced by Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana, 1985
The Czech film director Frantisek Cap, who emigrated to Slovenia, created the Slovenian feature film Moments of Decision in 1955. This black-and-white film, stashed away in the 1970s, addresses a possible reconciliation between Slovenian partisans and so-called Homeland Security tropes, collaborators with the Nazis in World War II (a highly topical topic again today). So it was ideal material for an experimental video. We used the video as a kind of surgical scalpel to the film; we used it to cut deep into the fabric of the film's surface.
Marija in the original 1955 black-and-white film was given her electronic twin, who imitated her cinematic gestures in the video and spoke her lines while still standing in front of her, which "forced" the film's Marija to say lines that were missing or censored in the film.
These missing lines we found in the original script in the film archive.
As one character says in our Moments of Decision video, "We were put on the street with no history or power; we inherited nothing but our own names, and the only value they had was on the ID cards and passports so often checked at police stations."