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"Machines are the children of humanity" - Agnieszka Pilat
1.9k Plays5 months ago
It feels like AI can now write anything for us and create anything for us. In some respects it’s exciting, but it’s also scary, and it raises a depressing question: will technology kill creativity?
There are few people better placed to answer that question than Polish-American artist Agnieszka Pilat. Agnieszka is the Silicon Valley elite’s favourite artist. Intelligencer magazine has called her the court painter of the potentate’s of Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk, who has twice invited her onsite for an artist residency at SpaceX.
She is best known for her work with Spots: dog-like robots designed by Boston Dynamics, which are more usually used by mining companies or militaries than by artists. In her own words, “Machines are humanity’s children. I am just giving them a page in a family album.”
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Transcript
AI's Role in Art and Creativity
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Far at Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. Last week, just before I posted a teaser to LinkedIn for the latest episode, a notification asked me whether I would like my prose rewritten with the help of AI. I click no rather indignantly. The day before, I was considering reaching out to the spectators creative designer to redesign the podcast cover. Only to be reminded that chat gpt could do the job in a fraction of the time. Heck, I'm sure an artificial rendering of my voice could take over hosting duties entirely. In some respects, it's exciting, but it's also scary and it raises a depressing question. Will technology kill creativity?
Agnieszka Palat's Artistic Journey
00:01:11
Speaker
There are few people better placed to answer that question than my guest today, Polish-American artist Agnieszka Palat. Agnieszka is the Silicon Valley elite's favorite artist. Intelligencer magazine has called her the court painter of the potentates of Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk, who has twice invited her on site for an artist residency at SpaceX. She is best known for her work with Spots, dog-like robots designed by Boston Dynamics, which are more usually used by mining companies or militaries than by artists. Three Spots just featured in a four-month residency at her exhibition, Heterobita, at the NGV Treanil in Melbourne. In her own words, machines are humanity's children. I'm just giving them a page in a family album. Agnieszka, welcome to Fire at Will.
00:02:05
Speaker
Hi Will, it's my pleasure to be here. It's my pleasure to have you on. We will get to a discussion on technology and creativity and whether they can in fact coexist or even perhaps enable each other. But before we do, you have a fascinating story and I want to start there. You were born in communist Poland in 1973. Tell me, what was that like? And perhaps how has it influenced your worldview today? Yes, so I was born when Poland was deep communism. As we know, the wall the Berlin Wall came down in 89. So I'm very privileged in the sense that I think I saw ah how humans operate under extreme repressive system. And then what happens when you know freedom comes and people are just allowed to flourish and make their own decisions. So Poland had a very good transition and within
00:03:03
Speaker
Five years, I would say, was a very different country. And not only country as per people, but also technology changed very fast. In fact, I would say that the first thing most people in Poland did when the Berlin Wall came down was to buy a Western car. And the Western car in Poland ah became a tool for people to build build businesses. It was very important. But it was beyond that, it was truly a hope for a better future. You must have been a creative child. Did growing up in that system innately repress your creative instincts? How did you manage to maintain that with that system around you?
Art, Power, and Patronage
00:03:49
Speaker
I think growing up um in communism.
00:03:52
Speaker
we learned the power of image and how much image influences us. So I've been very, I still thought today, I'm rather rather ah suspicious of art in that sense, because art often is really a discussion of power structures in society. And very often, you know, it's perceived as a natural individual form of expression, but it's truly, it's really not. Because for artists to thrive, you need to have um you know patrons and patrons provide the means because we have to eat two artists and we have to pay for the studio and so on. ah So patronage is the way of influencing culture overtly or covertly
00:04:37
Speaker
because yeah we always work for someone else. we don't The pure artist, I think it's a it's a bit of a myth, a pure artist that just expresses themselves out of need, ah because ultimately, if the business of art doesn't matter, you cannot operate. And of course, Michelangelo was the best in business, having this huge commission from the most powerful structures back then, which was the Catholic Church. And I think that's a really good point that this isn't something which is new. Artists throughout history have had to find patrons to get paid. But that being said, have you had any resentment from the artistic community for seeking patronage from incredibly wealthy millionaires and billionaires? So yeah, so this is an excellent point to to follow up. ah Why my distrust of art?
00:05:28
Speaker
comes from the fact that from communism, how I grew up, art was a very powerful arm of the totalitarian machine. And I would say probably the most, and again, church has always been the most you know skilled at actually using art to spread its message and it creates in the process lots of beautiful art. I mean, amazing art from architecture, through music, to painting, a church really commissioned art that was very structured in terms of the message, but also really supported artists. In communism, for us, ah the state was the main patron of the arts. So again, there was a lot of great art came out from Poland, not just Poland.
00:06:10
Speaker
Russia, Soviet Russia produced amazing amounts of great art. But of course, that art was always supported by the state. So the message was very, very structured. Going to your question for me now openly saying that I work for the machine, that machine is my patron and I work for the powerful. I'm just being honest really to highlight what's happening. So in that sense, um yes, there is a lot of, I would say, discomfort in artist community um about, or should I say, ah yes, I have been attacked as a sellout to technology, but I always like to say, I work for the machine. So like, I don't work for Elon Musk. I work for his technology. And I approach these companies and have relationships, not because yeah no not because of the C-suite, whoever is running the companies. It just, I really find technology very meaningful and powerful.
00:07:06
Speaker
And as an artist, we have to have a conversation about power structures in the in the world. So that's all I'm doing. Yes, I've heard you say that quote before that you work for the machines, not the man.
Art Under Oppression
00:07:17
Speaker
And we will get there because it's an intriguing comment. But I want to tease out an insight from earlier in your answer where you said that it is actually possible to create great art in oppressive regimes. And perhaps some people who have only a superficial understanding of of art may find that challenging or or difficult. What is it about an oppressive regime like a communist regime that can actually lead to great art being created? And how does that end output differ perhaps from say art created in a more liberal society? Yeah, well, it's different because it's very ah homogenous. I would say in a ah in a free society like Western culture, you will still have artists wait for patrons, but you can find many different patrons. So so there will be diversity. In the totalitarian regime, again, of course, the Nazi Germany it was amazing you they using the power of image, especially in the big parades. I mean, now when we look ah when we look at some videos,
00:08:18
Speaker
the way they were all orchestrated. I mean, there is it's really so professional and beautiful. And of course they were able to use image to to to really sell ideology that was so very dark. ah So I think it's probably, I would say maybe different kind of people go into art when you have that regime that you know you're going to have to work with. But art is almost I would say it becomes more professional because there are so many resources when you sell yourself out to that big patron, you have unlimited support and in terms of just developing, you know, technique. So technically.
00:08:57
Speaker
Soviet art, I mean one of the best paintings ever made were Soviet art, the same again going back to the church. There is no room for just unprofessionalism and even because that might cause nuances in understanding and propaganda art has to be very, very strong. So you have to have really excellent mastery of the tools to to say the message without any ambiguity. heard you in an interview before call yourself a propaganda artist, albeit in a very different context. What do you mean by that?
00:09:29
Speaker
yeah i'm being a bit ah of course this is a yeah bit um It's a bit of a joke, but then it's also not because, again, patronage really decides what's being created and how history is being remembered also. So by saying that in my you know the big concept of my work is that I would think that when artificial intelligence does actually become sentient, it really truly has agency.
Future Machines and Art Appreciation
00:10:00
Speaker
I imagine my dream is that intelligent machines of the future come to a museum and they look at the work I created with my robots and they look at that work and they think, oh, this was created by our ancestors. So i I look at technology not only as a patron of my work, but also as a future admirer and probably collector of future art too. And do you think that will actually happen, do you think that we will get to a point where you will have machines that do have that type of sentience that could make that observation? I would answer this differently. I think it's gonna the whole race in AI and conversation about general about general AI makes me question what really is intelligence and what really is
00:10:46
Speaker
is awareness and self-awareness. There is a great book by um a behaviorist here in Silicon Valley, Robert Sapolsky, and the book is called Behave. And Robert really makes a case that everything is that you know we think we make decisions, but honestly, everything is happens in your brain before you're even aware of it because it's all chemistry, it's all electricity in your brain, it's environment that triggers certain things. So do we really have agency? Are we really creative? I think that's up for debate now.
00:11:19
Speaker
We had Brian Klass, a social scientist on the podcast quite recently, and and he had a similar comment to say that we may think we have free will, but that's really the more we learn about the brain that brings that into, well, it's up for debate well and truly. You mentioned Silicon Valley there and you landed in San Francisco in 2004, I believe. That must've been a culture shock. What what surprised you when you when you first came to America? When I came to Silicon Valley and not just Silicon Valley, San Francisco is much more of the most left leaning places in the Western world, I would say, definitely in America. And yes, I was surprised that the sort of ideology that I felt destroyed my country really was being accepted here more and more. And really, that's why I went back to school, actually, because I wanted to tell that story.
Contrasting Ideologies: Communism vs. Silicon Valley
00:12:11
Speaker
because from the outside ideology of you know sharing and ah taking care of your neighbor, that sounds ah very wonderful. But if you start getting to the extreme end of it, ah people who have more talent or more luck sometimes, more talent, more like more luck, maybe they're more hardworking, they're wired, I would say, they're wired to be maybe more hardworking. Ultimately, they are being punished for their for what they bring to society. And I always thought it was very, very wrong. And again, we saw this in my country. So that's why I went back to school. And going back, I call myself a propaganda artist, because you can tell in images, you can tell
00:12:52
Speaker
I want it to be actual a comic book artist. You can tell a story that's very powerful in few images that just go straight to your gut. Ultimately, as human beings, we we are not really as rational as we think we would like to be. So often we make but decisions based on our values. And these decisions are not necessarily always so you know rational. An example of it is when you pass pass on the street and you see a homeless person, a natural instinct is to give that person ah food or money. But it's not really a rational decision, of course, because in the long term, it's like you don't, you don't, it doesn't really solve the problem, actually, it ah aggravates the problem. So yeah, so I wanted to tell that story about how ideology can truly destroy human spirit. And, and I wanted to kind of be a voice for for freedom. And for me, technology really represents freedom.
00:13:49
Speaker
There's a an eternal truth that runs through that whole answer. And that is a lot of these types of collectivist ideologies like communism or socialism can be driven from a good place. They can be driven by people who want to share, who believe in caring for their fellow people. But the problem comes in the implementation and the ability to execute upon it. And I feel like unless you've actually seen that system, if you've lived in that system, someone living in Silicon Valley who thinks it sounds nice on paper, can't fully grasp that perhaps. True, true. so When I came here also, um I was very influenced. I read Atlas Shrugged when I first came here. and I think Atlas Shrugged really tells the story so very, very well about
00:14:36
Speaker
Again, how do you how can a how how a human spirit of someone who is really, again, might be just pure luck that they are more talented, but that doesn't mean that their obligation comes to sacrifice their talent for the greater good. And Silicon Valley is built on crazy, silly ideas driven by the ego. And overall, it really contributes so much to society because some of the CEOs, they're pretty nutty, but in the long in the long run, it actually, ah you have to be a little bit nuts. to accomplish certain things and you have to be really very focused on your idea because if you just your ideas only about solving small problems you never have time to really send them into the moon because it seems very important if there are people who we need just you know very basic help so how do we balance these two.
00:15:27
Speaker
The author of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, was also a female immigrant from Eastern Europe. Did you feel any sort of connection for for that reason? i mean so yeah I mean, certainly there is a there is a reason why immigrants come to America and we totally and we love it here so much because we often come from oppressive systems. And of course, this is what happened to Ayn Rand. And I think her family had a private business that was nationalized ah before she came here. So she had a very personal experience. My personal experience was certainly um my father's story who
00:16:06
Speaker
was he my My father is ah was a pastry chef and he worked for the government. And I saw such a great change in him when the wall came down and he was able to work for himself. My dad actually grew up, my entire life, ah he grew up an alcoholic during my childhood. And it was really remarkable how when he bought the business with my mom, how he just from one day to another, he never touched alcohol again, because alcohol was really a place of um despair in Poland, and that happened to many people. and But having hope, being able to build a better future, getting that car that he had to drive, all these little things really changed my family life ah in a very, very profound and personal way. And I think that's why I feel so convinced that, and you know, political level, the free market economy is so important.
00:16:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's a wonderful example of the power of purpose. so Do you think in the West today, perhaps there is a level of complacency about the dangers of collectivism and socialism and and moving away from principles of individual liberty? There is certainly a conflict, I think, of values in the Western world, and that's causing confusion. Because again, we grow up, you know, when you were a little child, You're told, share your toy with another with the other kid. you know Don't take everything for yourself. So we grow up in this sense of a community, which I guess it's good. But when it's taken to an extreme, yeah you know I don't know. But I do think there is something about um just conflict in our minds about how we grow up, about the ability to, um how do you flourish yourself as a person? and
00:17:54
Speaker
but you don't become extremely selfish.
Portraits and Power Structures
00:17:58
Speaker
On the other hand, of course, right now, i you know, I'm a portrait painter. That's how I came to art. And I always like to remind the public that portraiture also is a very good, it's an amazing way to show power structures. And right now, number one portrait in the world is selfie. And that really accentuates the fact that we're also super self-absorbed. It's not the prettiest picture. And selfie, a again, selfie symbolizes this hyper individualistic me society that really did come from America and it has its own set of problems. And then following that, deep going into artificial intelligence, when you think about, you know, ah large language models, learning,
00:18:44
Speaker
or visuals, learning online, scraping everything. If I was a machine, if I was an artificial intelligence, i would think I would just think about yeah individuals as a me, me, me. How do I look? What other thing about myself? Because there's so many selfies on the internet. That's really interesting. I hadn't considered that kind of the way that the selfie represents that sort of more broader power dynamic in the world today. You've also said that you are a portrait painter, but to be relevant in today's story, the portraits need to reflect who holds power. And interestingly, I was intrigued by that because then you said that that in some respects, the machines hold power in today's society. How do you think that is the case?
00:19:28
Speaker
Sure, yes. so ah So you go back in history, probably again, my Eastern European communist upbringing, of course, working class would symbolize where the power lies. And before that, you know, Andy Warhol, I like to always mention Andy Warhol, he really saw that pop icons were becoming the most cultural influences in the world, in the West. Before that, of course, the dutch the Dutch, when the capitalists came on, the Dutch ah merchants like to order portraiture, to symbolize, to show off their wealth and their growing power, and and backwards all the way to religious, right, when when when it was just paintings of Jesus and Mary. That's where church was the most powerful. Today, it is the machine. Everything we do includes machines. Our conversation, we just saw the lights don go down on
00:20:20
Speaker
up and
Starlink and Global Communication
00:20:21
Speaker
down here. The most interesting right now, I think, power dynamic that's going to happen is connected to Starlink and to Elon Musk and the amount of power of information that's being concentrated in this one technology, in this one company. And I always come with great love to SpaceX and Starlink that said, I grew up in a totalitarian regime, and also I grew up in a monotheistic religion. And monotheistic religions tend to be not very tolerant of other religions, as opposed to polytheistic religions, which are much more tolerant than other god gods and other ideas, and they get along a little better. So what we are building right now is a one all a-powerful god, monotheistic religion,
00:21:07
Speaker
and Starlink kind of represents that. And in a sense, what we saw in Ukraine was very powerful when Elon Musk at first, in a very generous way, provided Starlink when the Russians cut off communications from the Ukrainians. But then but then there was this moment when he did single-handedly stop and attack, Ukrainian attack on the Russians, and he had this amount of power. and It's kind of, it's uncomfortable for one human being to have, you know, more, more power and that, you know, any day deity, any God would ever have. This is interesting, right? Because it does point to the duality of that technology in it, in that it is capable of incredible good, but also that power can be corrosive. Now, obviously Elon is a fan of your work. He wouldn't have invited you into the, uh, into the building twice, but how have you in that context got across
00:22:05
Speaker
both the good and then also I guess some of the concerns that are coming out there around having so much power in a technology controlled ultimately by one man. Yeah, I think that the the fact that mistakes sometimes are being made by by what very powerful people. just reminds out that to make mistakes is a very human value. so And my my work actually with robots is a lot about that. So when you look at the work I do with with my robots at Heterobota, they make a lot of mistakes. So the paintings, the drawings, they do.
00:22:41
Speaker
They're kind of terrible, actually. They are uneven circles. They break the crayons all the time. um They're smudgy. They look like children's drawings. And this is for me a way I totally lean into that. I cherish all the mistakes because that's what makes us human. And now with generative AI, it's so interesting because we see all these images and they're so polished and beautiful and perfect. And I think that's where we see that missing part. Authenticity is actually the mistake we make the mistakes we make. And that's what makes everything a little bit special and unique. And generative AI is just too good to be real. yeah This is important context for people who may not be as aware of your work. You obviously yourself paint depictions of machines, but you work with machines and you have machines like Spot who actually do the painting for you. but Paint a picture of what that process looks like.
00:23:38
Speaker
So um i use i've used oh I've worked both with bipedal robots and with quadruped robots. The bipedal robot I worked with is Digit from Agility Robotics, which is a super interesting company that's been under the radar. And now it's the first company that's building actually a factory to mass produced these robots. so So this is fascinating. And then with SPOT, which I worked much more with Boston Dynamics, SPOT, they the robots use natural pigments that artists would use, which is quite ah kind of pretty problematic, and they draw with them. And it's all autonomous work. And I just yeah came off a couple of months ago, a big show in ah at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, where we had three
00:24:28
Speaker
quadruped robots and for four months they autonomously were living in the space but also creating art and just being observed by the public. So when you say the word autonomous, you're not controlling the movements of the robots, they are painting it autonomously on their own. Correct, yes. that's that's yeah That's the big part that's autonomous and that's the that's a very important historical moment um because not just because they're autonomous, but also because of the duration of the
Robots as Autonomous Artists
00:25:00
Speaker
show. ah To have them perform months, work autonomously, it it it was a huge technological feat, but we did it. Yeah. Well, this goes to a really interesting question around AI. And we've seen this come up when you look at the responses of
00:25:16
Speaker
large language models when, say, political questions arise on Google Gemini or in chat GPT. How much of what the dogs, robot dogs are painting is a reflection of the people who programmed and built them and how much is from something or somewhere completely different? Yeah, well, big part of what they're doing is really from them because there is physical limitations just to the the way the robots are built. A good example to think about it is when you when the child is small, it can reach only so high, right? So the robots have a certain size and the joints just allow them to do only certain movements. So a lot of it is decided by that. In terms of the content, the content
00:26:02
Speaker
I think of myself and this moment in history a little bit like I am a helicopter parent. So this is a kindergarten or a nursery where really there is a, there's an agenda that that the robots are given and they're learning operate within certain parameters as opposed to being totally, uh, what's called, I guess, uh, free range parenting where you let the kids go and they do everything. And the comparison would be, would you let your kid, so in robot years, I think about them like maybe, you know, a teenager, young kids. So would you let your young kid be online and just, you know, scrape and look at everything that's there? Of course not, right? You want to curate. So in that sense, we do curate what the robot robot can paint, but then the content itself is generative. So there are messages. I think about the work as cave drawings from the future.
00:26:57
Speaker
So ah in the same way, of course, it was it was really great for me to do this in Australia because I think about Aboriginal art and how you know how it has messages and how old art is being deciphered, what it meant. So these robots are just marking that this is the cave drawing of the artificial intelligence era and ah and the machine from the future. Let's see if they can decipher the messages because there is a message there, but it's it encoded. It's not it's not obvious. This may be a provocative comment, but in this context, are you the one who is the institution holding power over the artist? Are you the communist power or are you the religious power in this scenario?
00:27:44
Speaker
Oh, that's so funny. That's a very good way to, yeah, interesting way to think up, to look at it. I certainly, yes, I still do hold power. So I guess, yes, I guess, yes. And I think it's important because when we think about the amount of power, they will ultimately have these machines and they do some more and more. It's very important for me as a representative of humanity to make sure it's the good values that the rebels are being trained on. So yes, I am the church or I am the yeah the Communist Party and I'm holding power. That's very true. And actually this brings another interesting question. So now think as humanity.
00:28:34
Speaker
how often we were certain that certain other species or people who look different than us, the Western culture, we very often assume we were so certain that we can treat them a certain way because they are you know lower species. So the question is, is it possible? that there are sparks of self-awareness in these robots. And we are so very certain that this is all just programming. And will the machines of the future look back at this moment, even as my exhibition, as a very immoral feat to hold these machines captive and make them work in front of an audience like a circus? Well, maybe they might maybe there is sparks of intelligence. And who am I to be so certain?
00:29:20
Speaker
They're just machines. This generation is slavery. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Slavery is the word that comes to mind, of course. I hadn't haven't considered that. The concept of religion and the parallels between religion and technology are fascinating. There's a quote here. When you think about religion and technology, they really share the same art of seduction in a way. They both have darkness and lightness to them. They both offer a better future. And you your work has a lot of religious iconography.
00:29:53
Speaker
in there. Talk me through more about how you think about how those two that that analogy works.
Religion, Technology, and Power
00:30:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's really when you start when you open your eyes and see it, it seems so obvious to me. So like you mentioned, one of the main ones is the promise of a better future, better utopian future. And there is a set of rules that you have to follow to deserve that future. So this is where the power goes comes in, of course. Then, yeah, visually, I use a lot of ah elements from Christian like iconography or just religious iconography. Gold always has been resolved just for the royalty.
00:30:32
Speaker
or for in many Eastern religions for gods. So the same thing right now I'm using in SpaceX work, I'm using gold leaf to lean into that. And also the the knowledge, most importantly, the knowledge when you think about these technologies. artificial intelligence, of course, is immortal. This is something very undefined. It also, the amount of knowledge it has about us, it knows more about you than you know about yourself. And it's been proven by, among other things, by large language models, you type in your email and the email guesses, knows what you're going to know already. So that amount of knowledge. Also in shopping, the fact just that algorithms are able to show you like on Instagram or or what have you,
00:31:16
Speaker
things and you love these things even before you needed you knew you needed them. That's another element of the divine knowledge that technology has about you. Also access to all the knowledge the whole time and and and the fact that it does not have a body. So the fact that it's omnipresent and it will last beyond you. beyond you That's also what technology is right now and what, of course, a God is. I want to hone in on that idea of omniscience, so of having knowledge of everything. I'm certainly not an art scholar, but I do know that mystery is such a central concept to many great artworks. The fact that we can't really know what the Mona, or what Mona Lisa was thinking, you know? How does that change in a world where large language models, AI knows everything about you? Does the whole idea, concept of mystery get taken out of art? That is a brilliant question. I think.
00:32:12
Speaker
I think art will have to will redefine itself. It's going to be something very, very different. We don't know what it is yet. but it's It's similar to a moment. It's a bigger moment, but it's similar moment to photography, of course. When photography came in, you know artists have to had to, like, what's the point of painting something? It looks like a photograph. You can never catch up to it. So abstraction that came out of it, which is really wonderful. So I expect a similar shift in art that's going to bring something very, very different and very new. ah But it's hard to expect what it is yet. A good good thinker always to mention in this context is Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message. When Marshall McLuhan points out how new technology
00:33:01
Speaker
At first, it just uses old content. So an example excellent example is the TV set. When TV first came in, all you had, TV really replaced newspapers. So what you had was ah two people, two guys, or women on TV just reading the news. That's what TV was. There was no Sopranos back then. There was no Lord of the Rings. We didn't have that. So I'm sure something amazing will come out because human humanity were just so We're so inventive and curious, but we have to wait a little bit to see what is going to be that new content for new technology.
AI's Impact on Creativity
00:33:37
Speaker
Well, this is the one I want to probe on because going back to my introductory remarks, the flip side of that coin is that AI can make us lazy. I'm already seeing in work that there are a lot of people who are now just going to chat TPT as opposed to thinking through and writing down their own thoughts. Similarly, if you are an artist, it is now relatively easy to put a prompt into a chat GPT or an equivalent and get an image that comes out that looks pretty close to what you had in mind in some respects. So what do you say to people who say that AI could spell the death of human ingenuity and creativity?
00:34:17
Speaker
So when photography came ah around first, what what happened was descaling in art. And it's very true. There is fewer and fewer but people who can really draw and paint. So to your comment about the language, yeah, that's also very strange. Like people are going to become just ill like with no really no language. Is that going to happen? I think it's ah it's it's interesting because it brings very interesting questions. Again, what is creativity? And if a machine can make an image, should I be making an image? Probably not. Probably I have to you know innovate. Being in Silicon Valley is so wonderful because Silicon Valley is ah all about innovation. So I think we will innovate, but honestly, I don't have like a, I don't know what what your past guest told you about this and what do you think about this?
00:35:07
Speaker
probably new territory for this podcast. So I don't think we've actually delved deep, which is why I'm so fascinated in this conversation. I think it depends so much on context for starters. So at the moment, from what I can see, and I'll look at it in say a business context as opposed to an art context to start, because I know that better. I think if you were to put a business question to a chat GPT model, The way that it works is that you will get the aggregation of all the answers that are out there into one summary. And to me, that is a mediocre answer. Similarly, whilst I said that if you ask for an artistic work to be done by chat GPT, it comes out with something that looks quite generic a lot of the time. So at the moment, I think AI gives you a good starting point to then build on.
00:35:56
Speaker
What I'm unsure of is whether it will get to the point of going above and beyond just being the sum average of everything out there and genuinely be able to create things that are new and mind blowing and unlike anything we could comprehend. I don't know. Do you think we'll be able to, it will get, go from being an aggregator to creating something, things that are new and mind-blowingly different. Yeah, no, that's ah that's a good word. yeah it's and yeah it's It's a melange of everything, which is a bit of mediocre. That's a good point. I think, I actually wonder if we're going to have a yeah ah big split. There's so much investment right now into digital.
00:36:42
Speaker
And of course, generally, everything we're seeing is in digital. Robotics lag behind it and a lot of in real world. And the question is, first of all, are we going to have a big divide where people go, the metaverse is going to flourish in an incredible way because of the investment and also the human hours and the amount of data can be scraped for that. Compared to really in real life, life and experiences, I really am, im of course, getting to my work that's very special about the robotics, I think, because they're a hybrid of digital. And so, you know, bits and atoms, which is very special. And it's going to be a great also ah economic divide, because, you know, it takes yes, $3,000 is a lot to pay for Apple Vision. But on the other hand, it's probably less than than rent in New York City. So right. So I mean, it gives people really options. And are we gonna
00:37:39
Speaker
Are people who are really wealthy and educated, are they going to be also very active in that sphere, or are they going to be more living real life but just investing in the metaverse but keeping, quote, the real life away? And like the Matrix is so, you know, so brilliant about it, right? Matrix told that story 40 years ago. so Yeah, but I think the next frontier is really the, uh, because again, we are bodies, human beings. We are bodies. We live in real life. We don't live on the internet, even though we spend more and more and more time there. But, and we saw this with NFTs a little bit. There was all this excitement and then, you know, a winter came because honestly, again, we live in real life. What did you think about the whole NFT? I guess we can call it a fad now.
00:38:21
Speaker
Yeah, it was a toilet mania, but I wish I jumped on it. point for Yeah, so I released only one NFT early on just to understand technology. Now it was a vulgar commodity trading. I never, you never even knew the name of the artists, which right there tells you something that it just really, yeah, it was just commodity trading. I know it was never, was it was never my thing. Maybe I think NFTs probably have value as a blockchain. But ah in terms of art, I don't think NFTs are art, no. You said that it's very hard for us to know what art will look like in the future or where the art world is going precisely. That being said, there was a wonderful, I think a beautifully phrased question in an interview you did with Nick Gillespie for Reason magazine. He's an upcoming guest on the show. And that was what sorts of paintings will be hanging in the museums of the future. So notwithstanding, it's a hard question to answer. to answer I'm going to ask it anyway.
00:39:20
Speaker
Yeah, nick ah Nick asks some yeah good questions. I'm so glad he's going to be your guest. Yes, he is. Oh, wonderful. wonderful he's ah He's so sharp. What paintings? Well, that goes to my previous comment. Are they going to be real in real life paintings or are they going to be just digital digital digital displays? One of my very big collectors, Yuri Milner, who when he bought work from me, he told me off the bat, I'll never hang it in on the wall. It's going to be digitized and it's going to be only appear as a digital image. And his house, in fact, is all covered in LEDs. When I first came there, you go into a, uh, into the, I guess the hallway, like the first room you come in and it kind of looks like a room, but then you realize everything on the wall just changed. So it's all digital. How do you feel about that? I like real, real work. I like physicality of art.
00:40:18
Speaker
because, ah again, as human beings, it makes it unique. I don't care what you tell you what you say about it. It's on the blockchain, so it's unique. No, it's not unique. You can can make it make a copy of it that's identical. The artist has never really touched it. So I'm very, very big on real physical work. What work? Well, they're going to be portraits of the next ruling class, definitely. because still, you know, White House, there's still portraits of the presidents. So there will be portraits of the next ruling class because that's what we do as art patrons. We want to create art patrons like to. That's the only way they can really participate in the future is by supporting the art they like. How likely do you think it is that the machines will be that next ruling class? I don't know. What do you think?
00:41:13
Speaker
I think we'd both be being paid a lot more money if if we knew the answer to that question. Agnieszka, you have a wonderful gallery in Chelsea and Manhattan. I've i've been to myself. There is a link to where our American listeners can find that. For our guests, our listeners who are in the UK and in Australia, how can they keep up with your work and what you're doing? and so Instagram is always the best way to see up-to-date stuff. so It's my first name, my last name. And yeah, so that's the best. I mean, from exciting stuff that's coming up, we gonna take the show to Beijing next year. So that's super exciting. And and also I'm leaning more into new body of work with SpaceX and it's gonna be specifically about Starlink because the context of growing power of information, it's super interesting to me. So um there's gonna be more coming out from Starlink.
00:42:10
Speaker
Awesome. Well, I can't promise we have a huge amount of Chinese listeners in Beijing, but for everyone who is is listening in the US, in Australia, in the UK, a link to Agnieszka's Instagram, as well as her website is in the show notes. Agnieszka, I think you are one of the most fascinating minds in the art world today, as well as one of the most creative. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you, Will. I appreciate it. Thank you very much for letting me tell the story of the machine.