Daniel García Andújar and David Casacuberta belong to the generation that made the transition from the industrial revolution to the communication one. Both consider technology to always be a control system and that artificial intelligence has opened a sort of Pandora box. The pair of artists spoke about all this and much more on the 25th of April at the Museu de l’Art Prohibit.
“Before we constructed collectively, but for the things that interested us Now, what we do is work for Meta, Google, OpenAI… uploading pictures that will then be used to train that system, so we are giving our free time away to those corporations: our work and our data”, stated David Casacuberta. Throughout the talk, both revealed various aspects about the algorithm control systems created based on our social media activity, revealing a new market inside capitalism: the construction of profiles.
The current scenario is very different from when they started working with the network with free software and codes: “all of this that built the internet got regulated, doors and windows were put”, remembered Daniel García Andújar; and he did not hesitate in affirming that “technology is always a control system”, in order to continue talking about the idea of an electronic panopticon that implies a structural change in the classic concept of a control tower, because now, we are all vigilantes, center and periphery. “During the pandemic I began describing the idea of the comfort dome, which is what digital capitalism offers us. We always feed this dome and during the pandemic, it got fed a lot and from there the artificial intelligence theme accelerated. We all have our fingers caught in the machinery, everything is in the hands of big corporations and there is not much communitarian work”, noted García Andújar.
This thread was continued by Casacuberta: “when we started, we built collectively towards the things that interested us. Now, in this comfort dome, we work for Google, Meta and big corporations and we created a new capitalist market. With the construction of new profiles, you can also politically manipulate, it was seen with Brexit… We fed the comfort dome and have no time for reflecting”.
“We learned when there were no navigators, we built understanding the language, there are thousands of image manipulation programs, standardizing programs… but technology tends to limit choice and cultural biodiversity, and the big step is taken by Artificial Intelligence because it has the capacity for calculation and political correctness is built into the code itself.”, added Andújar.
In David Casacuberta’s opinion “if there is no human creativity, we will have standardization, because algorithms work the same way. An algorithm is mathematical and will always do the same bias and that means more obvious and anesthetized stuff, like real life Minority Report. At the end of the day, art is to generate a form of resistance”.
Finally, both agreed in pointing out that to escape the filters bubble and the algorithm manipulation, it is in our hands to distort through variety to make building a profile of ourselves a little bit more complicated.
You can follow the whole conversation here: