September 19, 2020 – October 18, 2020 in Shanghai, China @ La Cava de Laoma
Artist and curator Luo Yaolan first began to investigate the connections between technology and contemporary art while writing for the Art Trade Journal of Beijing. Later on, with the support of Stimuleringsfonds from the Netherlands, she also began a collaboration with a technology company in exploring a new form of painting created by artificial consciousness. At the intersection of these vectors, Luo married aesthetic production and scientific knowledge in a framework, one that now seems to possess the potential to revolutionize the discourse of “art” as such.
Cosmic (in)Significance, then, is the result of this project, culminating in her current residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel. The works on display employ a range a media, inclusive of machines generated by 3D prints, different textures of paper, and pigments such as Chinese color ink, acrylics, oils, and watercolors. In cultivating a form of intelligent consciousness, Luo programmed her machines using a HTML5 software that replicates a basic neurotransmitter network system. The machines are guided by a set of designed algorithms set to numbers chosen arbitrarily, and therefore the system incorporates both logic and randomness. As such, the movements of the machine in composing each dot and every line of abstraction simulate a small learning process. The result of this feedback loop is the relationship between a text file and a movement, with the artist only intervening when changing color or medium. In an almost symbiotic relationship, human and machine alternate and inspire one another, adding layer by layer, color by color, day by day.
Luo’s work recalls Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1935 text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which criticizes the value of “authentic” art when the artist is displaced. In taking this notion one step further, Luo challenges the dignity of the artist herself in the creation of art. Indeed, when a machine is capable of crafting beauty, what becomes the role of the artist? When staking claims in the construction of aesthetics, does the current era necessitate a reshuffling of the conventional order and usher in a new semiotics of art production?
