The Spike Roundtable: Everything’s Computer

This is Spike's roundtable at the Julia Stoshek Foundation Berlin. What's happening with image culture right now is seemingly happening faster than we can put words to it or even name it. There's no way to assume mastery over this, like, guist right now. In any artist that says that they are, are blind. There's something about an image not being seen or a fantasy not being realized that it's actually a quite big driving force and art and creativity. I think we've solved desire and that's disastrous for humanity. In Spike's spring 2026 issue, everything's computer. We turned to a digital culture shaped by NetArt, Web3 and Generative AI, a culture that is fluid, murky and crackling with energy. As Gallery Weekend Berlin drew to a close that May, the magazine brought together a roundtable on new online aesthetics. The discussion featured writer, filmmaker and issue contributor Morgan Villoir, artist researcher Christopher Dake-Authett and critic and Spike contributing editor Dean Kisik. Moderated by Spike editor at Large Adina Glickstein, they discussed what happens to images after Slop, Law and the algorithmic feed and how, from the wreckage of the screen, new narratives, protocols and forms of shared life are beginning to emerge. Hi, everyone. Thank you for being here tonight. This is really exciting. I'm Adina. I'm an editor at Large for Spike and I write an online column called user error about internet culture. And we're here tonight to talk about images of which there are so many circulating on the internet and elsewhere as well. I am just in Berlin for a couple days. I am a recent transplant to California, specifically Silicon Valley, the part of the world where the technologies that are creating a lot of these new images are being rapidly pumped out by industry. And in a way that feels like kind of a strange bubble, right, but it also strikes me being here that the kind of chaotic upheaval in visual culture today is not at all unique to California. And this sort of once American mode of techno optimism has started to infect or maybe just affect the world around us. It's no longer really spatially bounded. There's something, you know, upending artistic production, creating new cultural discourses downstream of digital culture. And it's unfolding across geographies in kind of a crazy way. So as the title of Spike's latest issue, which is on new stands now, goes, everything's computer, which is a quip borrowed from the chief bonehead of the United States, but, you know, like a broken clock is right twice a day, and everything really does feel like computer right now. So despite being a tech columnist and a terminally online member of Generation Z, I don't quite know how to account for what's taking root in internet culture right now. There's something strange that I myself can't exactly explain and maybe tonight together will hazard some explanation. How are artists and cultural sense makers and critics and curators responding to some of these paradigm shifts in the digitally networked world, each of these shifts arriving faster and more hyped up than the last. To talk through it all, I am extremely honored to be joined by our panel tonight. We have Christopher Dayk out of it, a Berlin based researcher working across contemporary art, emerging technology and infrastructural anxiety. Morgan, beloved, a French writer and filmmaker who's worked navigates the intersection of critical inquiry and narrative practice and Dean Kisik, a writer and contributing editor at Spike and beloved man about town. And behind us, we have an image from a visual essay called Forensic Posting by Ruba Elsweel and all has on L1 who go by post post featured in Spike number 87. They write about this that widely circulated images some created newly while others are remixed hijacked reinterpreted deep baked or siphoned into another narrative. The visuals mirror a world where the age of photographic evidence dwindles into a reality that is plausibly deniable. Where truth is relative and virtue is what we can get away with. So we've kind of cleared the ground for our conversation tonight. I want to kick things off with some rapid fire questions because I am a panel accelerationist. Try and keep your answers to like one sentence or under guys. First one, estimate your daily hours of screen time. I think it's gone up to probably like seven hours, seven and a half, including computer or just phone. Yes, computer is screen. Yeah, six and yeah. Maybe eight, 10, but a lot of that is just working on the computer. I'm against screen time generally. What is something that is not yet computer? Ironically, it was the pool today, even though it was very similar to the cover of the Spike magazine. This was very anti computer and it felt very good. Yeah, I'm moving flat, so I had to clean my flat the entire day and didn't feel like computer. Almost everything is not right, just most of life is not computer. Is there anything that will never be computer? Hopefully love homemade dinner with friends. Yeah, still most things going going for a walk, going for a walk in the country. Where is AI? Hey, eyes in our hearts are in our souls. It also exists in many people's minds in a very extreme way where it maybe is all that exists in their minds at some point. I don't know the answer to this question, but maybe, I think you two maybe do, though, on a more technical level. You were telling me something last night, Chris, which I found really interesting, but I hadn't heard before. And it was something to do with, there's this question of whether you can generate the same image with AI twice and people thought you couldn't. And it turned out you can, you can generate exactly the same image twice, but to do that, as I understood it, to do that, you have to be using exactly the same hardware, because the actual hardware used to generate the image, kind of, introduces almost like a key or a randomizing element. So like in a very real way, AI is not just a software, but it's like the specific hardware configuration on which it's running. And the only way to be able to generate exactly the same thing twice would be to kind of take control of what hardware has been used. I mean, I think that that's an interesting point, and maybe, I mean, it brings us to a lot of interesting follow-up questions, but before we start getting to technical with everything, I think it could be useful just to look at kind of what's at stake and start with some like definitional ground clearing. So one of the ways that this panel is framed as is the new spike issue is around like the hyper contemporary and what's happening with image culture right now is seemingly happening faster than we can put words to it or even name it. And as we were sending around some images in preparation for the talk tonight, I was thinking a lot of these AI images have a strange relationship to time. They feel like they could kind of be from any time, and in that they're like from no time, there are like no time and all times simultaneously. So I wanted to ask you each, what does it mean for something to look contemporary today? That's a big question. I thought we were going to go somewhere else with time. I mean, you can take it where you want to get a few other thoughts about time. I just read like there was a Richard Dawkins tweet, and he was like one shot it by he calls Claudia for some reason. And he got one shot of it basically giving it his book and her saying that he asked whether the first word meant the same as the last word. And Claudia said basically like I read everything at the same time. And what you can say is like time is actually contained within me. I contain time. Just because of the way that these things happen, there is no sort of like temporal dimension. And it's kind of all times at the same time. So the contemporary condition that emerges from that, I don't know, it probably looks like slop at this point. But timeless slop, I don't know, maybe this will be a new category. I don't know, I tend to have this idea that you can only know what was contemporary at the time looking backwards. I think this is not the first time we have this kind of like psychotic collage kind of images. Two things that I have to think of when I was reading that question is the idea that sampling and collages as always existed. But just now it's not just human made. But also something that I came across not so long ago was ergotism. So it's like in the 1415th century, people used to consume rye and rye was a poisoned by a specific kind of fungus. So people were hallucinating all the time. And that also was like produced in arts, right? So you had this like crazy paintings, crazy depiction at the time. I don't know if like we can say that in the time of AI, we're all poisoned by this. And you know, you might create some interesting things to look at later on thinking it was contemporary, contemporary. But yeah, I personally never really know what to make of this word because I think we only know a little bit that quote, what remains and what was specifically interesting at times. I think ergotism is an unproven theory as they understand there. Because that's something they say a lot about how's that was a big theory about heronymous Bosch that he was the ergot fungus. It's they caught it like drunken rye. It's like a rye bread fungus and it does make you hallucinate. But it's also extremely dangerous like it killed. It's an extremely bad thing to happen. So it's kind of not sure if it is possible to like to be experiencing it and to paint. I also heard that Napoleon used to he would eat his main course and his dessert at the same time to be more efficient. That's kind of similar to how Claudio reads. the book, right? Like just everything all at once. I had some answers to the question if there's time. What was the question exactly? What was the phrasing just the last bit? What does it mean for something to look contemporary today? One thing you said is that the AI images look like they could have come from any period. And I was thinking that makes sense. That is contemporary because we live in this moment where we're constantly doing every historical period simultaneously. It's like a pastiche, a pastiche of everything simultaneously. So I thought making something that looks of every period kind of is the contemporary condition. But then it's interesting when you were speaking Chris, because you're saying that's actually how these images are made too because the program itself does not is making everything all at once. Yeah, just like Napoleon eating dinner. That's like a really potent metaphor in some ways. Yeah. Yeah, and it makes sense. There's also the medium itself. I mean the image quality production is like also a tell to this sort of contemporary conditions of like how huge AI has gotten. So can you say more about that? Like what quality tells? Do you identify with AI images? Like Sora had a specific quality to it. And now that's gone. Forever, our RIP will get no more funny sam outman something Jake Paul's like low quality memes. But I mean like with every generation you sort of like can tag when that AI production happened. So there is like a time in the aesthetic that it's coming out with. Some of the more sort of like vulgar-esque images are a little bit harder to place. I think they might be a little bit more timeless in this sort of like you know medium specific timeline. But I guess that's also like Kantian thing maybe. But like don't confuse the object with a method. It's hard to say how times playing out there. But there is like a visible parameter of the actual productions and sort of technology that went into making a lot of these things. Like I sort of infinitely accelerating like conveyor belt of newest that X1 replacing the next like an archeology of AI models. I had a friend who just went to is Becca Stan and they opened up like a UNESCO something funded by like a sovereign Dubai wealth fund or something. And instead of getting the real anything they basically made everything just like AI interpretations of like the market. But they did it with like an AI that was maybe a little older. So it all has this like a really really terrible quality that they have. They were very proud of it supposedly. But the entire museum is full of these like neo-archival objects that are videos of like people in markets looking at the street that was once there. And all the text is like slop text. And I think like there's something when you put it into like the archival museum context where things get very confusing in the context of time. But I do think there is a kind of distinct contemporary aesthetic as well when you talk about what models are going towards. And it's there's definitely an AI version of it. But it's this just super high definition kind of digital imagery when you're talking about the models losing their distinct characteristics. Everything's just tending towards a really crisp like fake photo essentially or a really a really crisp CGI image. And everything has this aesthetic of realism like like we're kind of actually not everything. But we're just dominated now by realist aesthetics. So it's this strange moment where more and more images are completely fake. But everyone's just everything's just trying to look super real in this really high definition. Your fashion advertising's like that. And if you go to a department store, those images are not been made by AI. But you go to the TV section. And it's just all these giant flat screens playing like this super high resolution films of like co-air balloon festivals. And it's really strange. Yeah, I wonder if I don't know if it's just speculation. But this is not coming down from like technical technicalities like trying to get as realistic and as as possible as as it is. To then only later just like downscale. Because I feel like also in like CGI and like video game industry, there was this thing going on with like trying to get like CGI character as realistic as possible. And then later on they were trying to like implement dust and implement like you know skin textures and implement just like different kind of like lower quality things. Because they cannot had demonstrated that like to a certain extent of hyper realism is kind of like triggering to the eye. So with AI and just for example image making or filmmaking, I'm thinking maybe maybe they just get to that higher point and want that like realism and possible like portrayed is realized you can downscale again to get to something a little bit more. Realistic in a more human way. So there are all these kind of strange technical things happening maybe like conditioned by the medium itself maybe because of changes in like the way that images circulate that have been conditioned by all this. And within this kind of changing contemporary image culture, where do you guys see the role of the artist? Not to get too personal, but I used to date someone who worked for an AI company which will remain unnamed. And he would quip that his professional duty was to abolish human image making which I always thought was kind of ghoulish coming from the arts as I do. So like what does that leave the role of the artist to be if this is the vision that the tech bros hold in mind for the technologies they're bringing into the world? Marshall McLeod and the media theorist used to say that artists are a distant early warning system for technological change. And I wonder if you think that assessment still holds true or if the role of the artist has shifted to something else? That's definitely not true. Like we know that there's no you'd be crazy to look to artists now for your view of the future or distant early warning system. But also it's like the kind of the whole world's like a distant early warning system now, right? That's half of what's in the news now is just doom saying about how technology is going to kill us all. And there's actually almost no one kind of put in like the optimistic point or the counterpoint. Maybe NSF there are. Yeah I feel pretty surrounded by billboards that are telling me that AI agents replacing me at my job are going to make my life a lot better. But this could very well be you know a Californian bubble. I wonder though I mean is there a way of conceiving of the distant early warning system that isn't just like cautionary hand-ringing are there different you know affordances or like ways of using emerging technology that you think artists are better suited to than like regular people? I think things move so fast. It's very hot. I mean you're not going to be able to do it through exhibitions, right? The technology is moving faster than the exhibition schedule. An artist could speak. They probably have to be talking online like everyone else to really to be really kind of warning and making. But it's also you know I just don't have to make images so much either you know that there's other paths as well. That's actually that big Josh Klein essay that was one of his big things is he's complaining about painting essentially like that's one of the major thrusts is that there's just two art became too much about making and selling these images or New York art. Can you explain a little for anyone who might not have read that essay? What was that stake in his critique? Well Josh Klein he wrote uh do you remember the title? Like why can't you be an artist in New York anymore? I forget the exact wording but it's how New York real estate ruined art something. I think it uses the phrase ruin and it was published in October. He's saying that it's too expensive it's too expensive to live there to make art there and to show art and so on and that that has ruined the art world there but also you know he thinks ruined a lot more outside of New York too but he does talk quite a lot about painting being a problem like because of the costs painting became the only viable way for artists to support themselves and make money and you'll see this I mean obviously that's that's true everywhere you'll see this I remember coming to gallery weekend here last year Anna Imhoff had her gallery show but she's also got to make like a big wall work to sell and Cyprian Galliard was showing his film but he's also got to make a big wall work to show that's just the kind of the game now like you have to make images and sell even as a very successful well-supported artist but there's been there's been a lot of good art that's not about making images right I think for me when you post that question I was more thinking about like how what is being somehow stolen or taken away from let's say artist musician writers right now is just like a generative force because in a way I think that what AI is doing with automation is like a cross-discipline thingy where you know everybody is going to be concerned to some extent at some point with what it's doing so when we think about the questions like the interesting questions to me that it brings about what it is something what is at core and human-made things like what is novelty why do we cherish things we cherish in our existence and also more practically how do we make protocols which I guess we'll talk about later about like valuing certain things or just giving credits where credits is due or redistribution even so I think that maybe I don't know if artists are like an interesting warning sign for the future but I think that what's happening within the creative and artistic industries are just very relevant for people at large to be concerned with because AI is coming for images but for many more things than images so maybe this just interesting ideological economical and legal conversation to have that artists can start although I know it's not on our shoulders and yeah we don't have the economic instances to do that but I think that's that's where something interesting is happening I think artists are like a warning sign, but not in the way we think anymore. in a totally different sort of parameter because for a long time the artist would discover something in the margins of some form of technology, some medium, some sort of expression within some sort of like geist or like you know moment in time and from that something would emerge or something would be discovered but now it seems like they're acting more as like being thrust into that role is a total failure because there's no way to assume mastery over this medium right now and any artist that says that they are are lying for the most part I would say and the people that are trying to make AI artists into a thing where they have some sort of unique position is also I would say a very bad faith sort of argument and I think for the first time there's a new sort of like non-material edge that the artists are part of they're being thrust into this position that reveals some sort of mechanism of how we seen artists for a very long time maybe like especially in the American sort of way of master the genius I mean we went through sort of like collective but I mean this was more of a relational aesthetic socialist prop up for many different programs as well so there's always been a reason to sort of do this and there was a quote to about like research and artistic practice in a technological society essentially being the same thing and you can see now also with the amount of like creative technologists identifying as artists doing cutesy little things that like media artists have been doing for a long time it's not arts it's more of like a soft arm promotion for what we've been sold for a long time as like technology can make you into some sort of artist or creator or creative class like the idea is kind of the artist just taking up the role of like producing the tech demo in a sense even more so than before I mean before at least there was like still the idea that there was like a legible sort of like creative hand in guiding it even if there was guardrails but now it's empowering people to make visualizations of like cutesy things where I don't know the goal is to make Instagram reels and get people to like go to your GitHub and like get like funding for something like that's not your art project so it sounds like to kind of gather some of the insights here right like the role of the artist is definitely changing but maybe it was sort of a foregone conclusion to begin with because of the ways that artists have been made to relate to emerging technology from the outset but at the same time there could also be there's runway left yet that we should heed the artists warnings about the way that technology is affecting social change or maybe we're just speaking correctly when we talk about the role of artists as a source of information about social change because the processes through which they work and the places where they show their work can't keep pace with the speed of technological change I mean amidst all of that like where does that leave the role of curators or are there other figures who are sort of like the the new oracular or sense making figure to take the place of the curator today I was talking to somebody dinner last night about like the club being imported into the art gallery and the art gallery being imported into the club and nobody can agree which direction to go it seems like more club nights are trying to become art nights and somehow it's like a two-way thing where nothing really works that well in either direction I like think this curatorial kind of thing is still somehow in that direction but I don't know in terms of like a popularization of like making events that people want to go to um especially like the club nights the artist secondary but the curation is still like the idea that somebody's doing it is very important did you have a human doing it I mean yeah this is essential because you need to figure ahead you need somebody that you like want to support a little bit I'm not sure if anybody feels differently curator having someone pick things out or point you in a direction is is incredibly useful now when there's so much so much to choose from or is it so much to distract I think the role the role of curator maybe hasn't changed that much though I think a curator is supposed to just but one of the roles is to find good art that they believe in and advocate for it right yeah so how does how does that sustain in the kind of conditions for working for artists you were describing a minute ago curators kind of want to like fade into the background in a way like they don't want to they feel like they don't want to be the stars I think it'd be good to have some more like ambitious outspoken curators I think that would be good people you know trying to put on big shows make big statements or we just had this the Whitney Biennial that's up now I haven't seen it so maybe maybe it's good but they but they kind of decided well it's a difficult Biennial or it's a difficult context so there's no title we're not going to tie to it and there's no theme it's not a very like that's not a very strong response I think right yeah refusal is still a theme yeah but I mean there's I can name at least one star curator who is really like doing the heavy lifting to try and pin down and like articulate something that's happening in digital image culture right now which would be Homsel Rick Obrist who's working on this show in parallel to the Biennial and Venice right now about protocol art with Matt Dryherst and Holly Herndon I wonder what's at stake to each of you in this gesture of sort of naming and emerging movement as it's coming into being like how do you understand maybe to back up what is a protocol what is that word of oak for each of you or what do you think it means and then what is that quantity with art yeah I mean to just build a moment as I was saying earlier I'm not too attuned with protocols and also like these applications but I think in general just sitting down and really thinking about ways to organize and way to think about what's going on and possibly do regulations or just like systemic thinking around it I also think that I know this is about AI and images but in general I've been quite interested in just like processes of automation and I think from like workers movement to also like crafts there's been just quite a few moments in histories where people have been trying to show up and trying to think about ways to just move things a little bit around politically or economically to get their rights done or get their redistribution done so I think the question of protocols for me in that context is just like extremely overwhelming because I don't have the technical insights but mostly fascinating because it really wonders how could we actually as artists like organize to show work to get work validated to also get credits and more practically you know it's like how can we actually demand from those platforms who are creating whatever images on their own behalf to properly redistribute something to individuals and I know this is very difficult because we live in a globalized universal I mean what is universal protocol right like this is another difficult conversation but we have seen quite some people trying different kind of like redistribution system with metal label for example someone also told me recently that New York Times sued open AI I don't know there's just some things that are apparently happening so can you briefly explain what's going on there for people who might not have the story oh I would love Aziz to have the mic because I don't know exactly but okay apparently when I was discussing with Aziz who's in the room apparently was what we were just discussing is like who gets to actually do justice to those big enterprise and the question of like associations because apparently from my now understood like it would be stronger of an argument if bigger and more media outlets would come together against open AI instead of just New York time alone and I think if New York time alone cannot really make a case because I think it's unresolved right now it just shows like you know what kind of monster you're fighting against and so I'm just thinking you know globally university what would it mean to actually make a case against AI for like outsourcing some of your images text etc etc right now we can only look at those cases from afar but hopefully there's interesting conversation that are like drawn upon it's that we can also learn from so maybe there's something useful in these gestures of naming a moment like protocol art in that it kind of collects artistic responses to the broader social conditions and once we have terminology for it we can kind of better understand through the art that's being made what's going on at a bigger social scale is that kind of what you're saying yes I guess it's just also understanding the legal framework that are working against us because from what I know at least in like the AI generation landscape what is inherently problematic is also just like the way it is being phrased as like model learning as learning right just bypassing many kind of like loopholes by just calling it learning and not copying or stealing for example I don't know how to define what a protocol is is it a set of rules I mean in this context I think it's just a language of control I think that's how it's being deployed I think it's being deployed in a way where all the other kind of issues that we're surfacing here whether it's like the AI curator the AI artist it's a way to try to engage or create some form of agency over this whether it's successful who knows but I really feel like it's the reaction to trying to find I mean I've been thinking about it as a this sort of basic sketch of like this soft protocol art that happened and then this hard protocol art that happened and soft protocol art being something like people that especially in post-internet art were performing like within a platform within a market within an identity that was bound to like the channels that were available not that many people were trying to play outside of it and now it seems more people are trying to think of ways to get off of those things or reclaim agency somewhere else and by talking through through the language through the lens of protocol. It allows for at least to think about it. I haven't seen the show. I would like to see how it's being deployed and how it's being used, but I also feel like the reaction maybe is the most important part. - I'm excited to see the work personally. I mean, so the definition of protocols that I think is the most persuasive comes from the media theorist, Alexander Galloway, who says the protocols, and this is the subtitle of his book called Protocols, or how control exists after decentralization. So what does that mean, right? They're like rule sets, but they're rule sets that enable, even within a really like horizontal landscape for means of control to still organize the way that information flows. I don't think that's exactly what's meant by protocol art as like a catch all term for, you know, AI art plus, like AI plus blockchain art, which seems to be the way that it's being used now. And I wonder if any of the like valences of this idea of protocol as a mode of control within a really chaotic landscape, maybe, you know, akin to Dean, the necessity of the curator that you were talking about a moment ago could be useful in eliminating like what's happening to art in the image landscape today. - So what is protocol art? - Yeah, we'll have to see it and find out. - Yes, hard 'cause no one really defines it, but the show opens tomorrow, so it should be defined. But I think it's the idea that artists should be making protocol or the like an interesting way to make art, but maybe a way to have more of an impact in the world now is to be making protocols rather than works. So before you might be using a piece of software to make the work or something like that, and now they're saying, actually, the power is in the software companies and the powers and people creating the systems or creating the rule sets or creating software. So the real protocol art or the real kind of interesting move is rather than making these discrete artworks to try to create a system or create a piece of software to kind of write the rules yourself. - Yeah, that's so interesting 'cause to me, that's a very old notion like that goes back at least as far as this Jewish museum exhibition in New York in 1969 that Jack Burnham curated talking about systems art and the idea that like the artist should take the sort of organizing technological means like structuring technology into their hands and take that as the material for the artistic practice is not at all a new one with the rise of AI. So maybe there's something to be learned here from like the longer history of artists' experiments with technology, I mean, like artists as corporations, this also kind of goes back. Do you think those were pre-scient examples or are we just living in a time where nothing is truly nothing is new? - I mean, I think they would say the same thing, but it's more, but I'd actually be more interested to hear them make a case for like, what is going on now that's different from them? And like, why does it deserve a term? 'Cause once they start talking about protocol art, it's they say, well, you know, everything, everything fits under protocol art really. Running a magazine could be a protocol, doing this round table is a protocol and of course this is going back decades people have been doing these systems and these rule sets and then it just becomes, it's not so, it's not a useful term really, right? It's not so interesting, but I am interested in you know, someone which I think is what's supposed to happen with this show and I've told Matt Dryhurst before he should write a manifesto and I don't know if it just seems like we're crazy I'm talking about complete vapor here, but I think an example would be the big Hollywood and Matt Dryhurst show that was at Carvee recently, like that is, they're probably the most prominent, almost certainly the most prominent protocol artists out there and I think that show setting up the choir, setting up the systems in there, that's like a big, this is protocol art and this is a new mode of art, fairly new mode of art. I mean, I do find the ideas interesting actually, Holly and Matt also had this idea of like identity play, the idea that the artist identity could be kind of given away for free, for anyone to play with or you know, it can be like a shareable material. Actually, I find the ideas more interesting than the works that have been made around them. - I mean, no, I thought this idea of identity play and their work was a really interesting one. So Holly Herndon had this really experiment with it where she essentially like licensed her voice and like rented out the ability to deepfake her voice, which as a musical artist by training is kind of her most important proprietary asset, let's say, like farmed it out to a distributed autonomous organization, so a blockchain based group of voters who could authorize things that they had deepfaked her saying as like true instances of her expression or not. And this, yeah, this like identity play, this play of what characterizes the artist, what is their selfhood, what is their product, is maybe one of the more durable notions to come out of this. But I think it also kind of gets at a bigger question of like, what happens to the body in this kind of image first culture? These assets like the voice that we think of as being irreplicable and embodied. So obviously aren't. And at the same time, there still seems to me at least like a pretty stark divide right between what's happening on screen or what's circulating on the internet and where my physical body sits in space. And my back and neck hurt all the time from being on the laptop. What is happening to our bodies amidst all of this change? - Yeah, I don't know, I just read this meme untraceable, but it just says something out on the line of like that you shouldn't trust your eyes 'cause they lie to you all the time, but you should trust your body instead. I think when it comes to just mentioned voice, we're just talking about images right now. A lot of things are becoming ever more like edited and no rendered. I believe that to some extent, yeah. And this is something that we can maybe talk about after when we talk about desire, but like the body might become the real body, might become the, let's say, most important thing to experience in terms of tangibility. I was talking about it with little internet from your models. Recently, I don't know if this person is in the room, but we're talking about media theory online and like influencers and he was telling me that, yeah, the idea of like having a face and being a real person that does theory online is actually the best neck thing to do right now. So I don't know, I tend to think that even through a digitalized relationship kind of like experience, the body and also I suppose that events like this just proves this right, right? Being fleshed out, having this conversation is actually still a big thing. So where does fantasy reside in all of that? Because I know your research has looked a lot at the role of fantasy and desire in increasingly technological image regimes. And these fantasies are about what you've called impossible images. Is any kind of image still impossible? And if not, then what happens to fantasy? Where does it go? - Yeah, I mean, I wish for this to be a more open question because I research this throughout the years, but I'm also a little bit doubtful myself now, but on YouTube, for example, I'm seeing all these ads for like Sora or all these sort of website that promises that you can render anything and do any kind of movie making right. And like one of their headline is like shortcuts to imagination or like anything you've imagined can become real. And I just don't know, I just am hearing it. And I'm just like, was it meant to be like this? Because actually it's beautiful that, you know, every ID can come to life, et cetera. But I just have this inherent belief that there's something about an image not being seen or a fantasy not being realized that it's actually a quite big driving force when art and creativity. I mean, we can mention like Marcel Proust or also even I love Dick by Chris Cross, which is based on like an unrealized right, like fantasy, but also yeah, snake dog by Tariq of Man. I mean, I think in general, this is an inherent drive in like artistic practice and creativity. This drive for like seeing something being realized and conceived. And so when I see this idea of shortcuts from, you know, A to B in a fraction of a second, I just wonder like, what happens to desire and fantasy as a driving force? I also wrote quite a long piece of text that was referring to Pierre Crossowski and the living currency in which he stipulated in a foreseeable future, people will need object of sensation as currency exchange. And when I first read this text in 2022, I was thinking like, no, this is not accurate at all to the current landscape we're in because AI, chatbot, girlfriends and stuff were a thriving, but I actually feel like nowadays it might actually take that turn. So I think it's interesting to like review this text over and over again, thinking that without even thinking about automation, Pierre Crossowski maybe had that seen something we can't even render for the yet. What is the idea of body as currency? It's kind of like speculating within a foreseeable future. I think this was written in like the 70s in a foreseeable future object of sensation would be the only money of exchange. So people would actually be like circulating and exchanging goods based on like bodily exchange and sensational exchange. And I think this was an interesting standpoint. I mean, this text is read from a very different perspective. It's also read from like a sublime art kind of perspective. I think it's a very difficult read, a book to read. So don't quote me on this, but this was actually one specific reading of that text I was interested in. And yeah, I think that's when, you know, at the time where AI, child bots, et cetera, were thriving and this to our body a little bit more with more criticism nowadays. I think it was an interesting take because I was looking at these takes thinking, well, this is the exact opposite what's going on, right? Like we are starting for object of sensations that are actually distant, rendered and not physically fleshed. Yeah, and right now nowadays in the conversation that I'm having, either when it comes to automation of job or who's going to be the next influencer or even seeing this room I'm thinking, yeah, indeed, maybe fleshed objects of sensations are going to be a valuable thing to look forward to. What would Klasaski say about Luxmaxen, do you think? I think he would be thinking that's the best way to sell objects of sensations maybe. It's capitalizing on your only currency maybe. I think he'd be a realist about its market value. Yeah, there's a lot of money being made. I mean, that's incredibly embodied, right? I don't know if the fantasies are so digital now. That seemed to really struck a nerve. It really is one of the most written about phenomena, maybe the most written about cultural phenomena in history, but it was way up there. And obviously it's like it's the shift to male beauty, which is in itself an interesting shift. That's an extremely hardcore relationship with your body, actually, to be injecting yourself with testosterone from 14 and making yourself sterile and things like that. It's quite an interesting powerful one. I was going to say, I think it communicates maybe some of what's happening in the shifting terrain of desire in that I saw a documentary recently with a surgeon who performs the Leg Lane getting surgeries that some looks maxed her as opt to get, which is like an extremely painful process. You have to break your leg in two places and then Rod is inserted that stretches it out. And if you have this horrible surgery with many weeks of downtime twice, then you might stand to grow up to six inches. So it's like a meaningful gain, but at a huge cost. And when the surgeon was talking about his patient's motivation for seeking this kind of surgery, he actually doesn't really cite like sexual marketplace value or beauty standards as the main impetus that they come to him. There's stated reason, at least often in describing to him why they want this like terrible painful surgery is because they think it'll make them more successful in business. They imagine that there's like an ROI financially on being taller. And I wonder if like the reduction of all relations to market relations is generalizable when we talk about what's happening to fantasy or desire in view of the changing image. Yeah, what's happening to desire? I mean, it's so it's so complicated, right? I mean, obviously. So if you read the goon in piece, which hopefully some people will have read, I'm not going to recap the whole thing here, but these these guys who are, you know, they're watching all of this pornography, but they're not really watching the pornography. It's kind of about something more than pornography. And actually you'll have like a setup like this where there's like 16 or 24 porn films playing simultaneously and you're watching them for 8, 10 hours, but they're trying to reach this like mythical goon state, you know, like this kind of like transcendent flow state, whether it's kind of unclear to them whether it's even real or whether they've whether any of them have reached out or if it even exists, but it's a kind of radically different relationship with desire, but it's kind of similar to what everyone does, right? Because desire is all this a large part of what people desire is just to look at their phone just to like just look at a scroll just just to be kind of addicted to this scroll or to put their body image online and to get likes and something I've been thinking about a lot recently is I think we've solved desire and that's disastrous for humanity, you know, we have these like weight loss drugs that just kill all your desire. This is we're living in the kind of Buddhist utopian, we let yeah, it's like a Buddhist utopia where we no longer have desire because there's drugs to see set and your phone will just constantly distract you with all this everything you want to see and that should eliminate all suffering, but it doesn't, it's making people unhappy. Even when I think about Luke's Maxing, like people who drive for this like business success or dating success, they have an image in mind, right? So I think, I don't know, maybe I would disagree here on the idea that we kill desire because we solved it. Well, even solved, right? Because sometimes we joke about it with friends that actually, you know, beyond the incentives of like being a very successful, beautiful looking man who's successful in business is maybe the incentives as well to like, you know, get certain kind of like, yeah, relationship or admiration attached to it, right? So there's, we don't know what image we're looking at anymore in terms of like, here thinking about Luke's Maxing, but I'm pretty sure these people have like some kind of fantasy in mind. I think the interesting things is specifically when it comes to body perception is like what happens when what you're looking into in terms of representation is just a rendered image and then it's like this internal loophole that maybe solved desire, perhaps. Well, I was telling you I was watching this AI porn. I think it's going to ruin porn. You know, there's this different stuff, but I saw this, I looked at this site of some reason, I'm sure there's a reason, but I almost, it was like kind of fake celebrity porn. And almost, almost every person was Emma Watson. It's probably like about 50% or more Emma Watson. And I watched this and I didn't subscribe so I could only see these very short clips, but I watched this like clip and it's like pornography with someone in this kind of like composite being who's so beautiful, you never see that in pornography. It's like, it's this kind of like impossible pornography that doesn't really exist with like real people. And when you see it, it's kind of amazing for about 10 seconds. And then it's kind of like, it just doesn't like pornography doesn't work anymore. Like there's no, if you can see anything, it's just completely pointless, you know, like you say about, I don't know, that the fantasy shouldn't be realized or something. Or I think that form of video pornography is probably going to, like all forms will probably collapse a lot in the coming years, I would think. Didn't they say the same thing about the sexual revolution? Like when everything is permitted, nothing is possible. Is this just the continuation of that? I mean, that is a huge, that is a huge reason why we have this gigantic desire crisis, though, is because there's no longer taboo, there's no longer taboo in the Freudian sense of like a sexual taboo. So therefore, what is there to desire? How can you desire when everything's accepted? This is one of the theories for the problem of contemporary art, you know, that so much of art was driven by taboo by kind of this disfeeling that your desires are not allowed in society or that you're impure, you know, it's kind of fighting against. And now without that, without those taboos to fight against, it becomes harder to find these inner drives. But on the question of video pornography collapsing and that sort of thing, there is this thing, I mean, people seem to be falling in love with AI, girlfriends, and boyfriends a lot, right? It's happening, but it's always, as I understand it, you know, I don't have one, but as I understand it, like they're kind of falling in love with a chatbot more so than with like some beautiful rendered, like, like these relationships are actually sometimes they have avatars. Okay. There's maybe like a spectrum of people falling in love with cloud code or what was it, Claudia? People falling in love with Claudia. I mean, people fall in love with cloud just call it different things. Yeah, right. Because like there's no way to differentiate cloud. Unfortunately, there's characters there. There's like the text-based role-playing game version of having an AI lover on one end of the spectrum, and then I think they get increasingly more elaborate and perhaps immersive. But I think there's fixed volume about like how much maybe we don't need the image so much, right? Because if you can get a text-based thing, you have much more ID. Like I like to always joke about how this is very much similar to love is blind. It's like you can get like a chatting person, but then you meet them in real life and it's so disappointing. And it's only like kind of designed to fail, and this is why the show is like kind of appealing to look at. So I think like text-based things somehow still I think have like much more market possibility than in terms of desire. Yeah. That's why it's why everyone's using sub-stack right now. And it's by everyone's kind of it's like transference. That's when you were talking erotic transference. I think that's what's kind of coming on with desire and falling in love with the machine. It's all going to be this like parapsychological, you know, it's going to be having like deep intense emotional relationships with yourself essentially. This is why everyone's back in psychoanalysis because talking. Yes, exactly. Exactly. You know, famously as good as fucking according to Jacques Vicon, right? But that's also the influencing machine origin of this whole thing. I mean, like the Victor Tusk influencing machine. I don't know this. He like hanged himself and shot himself in the head and wrote a suicide letter to Freud and Freud was like you're too melancholic it was probably for the best. He also said that like his suicide was like the best thing he ever did like many suicides with his life. But right before he wrote this thing on the influencing machines, which was about schizophrenic patients like being controlled by some sort of influencing machine in general. Not all the time in love with it, but like very computational like labors, machines, police. And this would be some sort of like I don't know some sort of like estimate relation with how people see their relation to some of these chat bots. I would also say that like a lot of the images are still passive for the most part. So the big thing of falling in love is like you need to be part of the process. And that means like in this case and a lot of the time is textual. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people talk as well, but the voices are sometimes have this kind of like HR department love romance kind of thing. So I don't know maybe it's hard to fall in love with one of those. Yeah, it's hard to fall in love with Siri. But I mean I think the really like obvious layers that when you're talking to a therapist, A, there are another person and transference comes from the unknowability of the presumed human other on the other end. but also as a practicing therapist, they're bound by a code of ethics about how they can treat you and they've gone to school to learn how to handle the weirdness that is transference. And maybe when you're falling in love with Claudia or whatever your AI companion of choice, maybe there is no such regulation, there is no such ethical code. I think AI companies have very strict codes of ethics. It's one of the role of the artists is to create desire. It's one of the role of the fashion designer, but it's not really happening now. Like that role has been largely abandoned. That's a problem too. There's also the exo-capitalist. What's the name of the piece in the magazine? Very big economy, very big things, very big something, very real. Very big tech. Very big tech. The looks-maxing thing is desire, but it's desire to reach a location within the real economy. The other economy is just your ladder to get to the real economy. In this tech world, the human is kind of irrelevant in their application of the thought that all these companies don't actually need humans at all, because they are just able to move around money in a way that the human is kind of irrelevant at some point. They need to be the idea of them needs to be there, but in practice not really. So it feels like a lot of the looks-maxing stuff is kind of. I mean, they haven't read any of this, I'm assuming, but it seems like they want to get to the position where they can enter this sort of like real economy, where real money is doing real things, at least in this sort of like tech overlord kind of way. I think with that we've been going for almost an hour, which is frankly impressive you guys. And before we yap for too much longer, I'd love to open the floor to some audience questions, because I'm sure between AI pornography and the diminishing role of the artist, we've given you plenty to be angry about. So if anyone has anything that they're interested in asking, I think we can get a mic in the crowd. Wow, thank you for that genius lecture. And the fact that we are all here after Hangover Gallery Weekend, means that we all have a laugh affair with our computers. And what Dean just said before we're not going to make it through observation. You spoke a lot about porn, and it's about observation. So if we really act the vision, why are we all going home after thinking about the vision? Why are we not working the night through, like the fathers of. Unfortunately, all the fathers, no mothers, of democracy, of Germany. If we are back in 1990, New York, and there's no AI, so we artists created fantasies. You talked about the fantasies, the fantasies that evolve in the computers. And they're so strong that I think almost all of us have a deep physical relationship with our computers and a laugh affair with our computers. And how we make it to make this not only a fantasy, to rewrite the computer. What should we do instead of observation? One answer right now is build protocols. Isn't that sort of what's being offered to us as the way forward? All the girls are making cyberdecks, so maybe that's the way. If we had cyberdecks, cyberdecks, I guess you could make one for cyberdecks. What is a cyberdeck? It's like a small personal computer that's like, has some funky Y2K energy. Yeah, I just wanted to have some clarification. You mean like, what do we do with our passion for the computer? Why don't we understand the question? Yeah, because I wasn't so sure like, do you mean like, what do we do with our passion transferring from the computer to real world? Or like, what do we do to save? There's several ways of. Because, not rightly, we need to observate a lot in order to act wisely. What is the alternative to observation? Which kind of thing you would like to act if you would be recreating the world? How would you act? I definitely don't think you need to be making new protocols or protocol art. And I don't think you have to be using AI or using a computer or a phone more than you need to. I'm not advocating for any of these things. I'm not sure whether my fellow panelists are either. To remake the world. But yeah, to remake, I mean, it's a big question, yeah. That's kind of a hard one, too. One sentence on how to remake the world from each of you. Where do we begin? It's hard for one sentence, I think, for me. Sometimes I tend to think that we. I don't know, it would be great to just keep AI for the things that are like, extremely necessary and maybe just like, remove it for the rest. I don't know if there's ever a time in history when we could all agree that like, this was fun, but we can also unplug. That would be an interesting thing. But because it's not going to happen, like, maybe having constructive critical conversation around AI. By the way, is your cap saying AI future? It's just saying aim for the good of these. Ah, end of future. Okay, sorry. Yeah. I mean, you also, like, it depends if you're thinking about the history of technology and the computer. It's pretty much the Western tradition of like the Simo Day and some of the people looking to Greek philosophy and thought was like the origin of like, everything that's embedded in the technology that we use. So I guess you start there somewhere. In this time, if he's thinking about the Western sort of application and embedded sort of processes in technology because it's all still there in some sort of way. It's like a time travel or, I don't know, restart society. I think we send all the tech bros to psychoanalysis and make all the psychoanalysts get iPhones. Do we have another audience question by chance? Okay, maybe it towards the back. Like, I see one over here. Hi, guys. What about collaboration? Because you mentioned the example of Holly Hurdon where she, yeah, she gave her voice so that through AI, it can be reused for music writing. And for me, the idea, the way I see it there, I think she was saying that kind of the technology is more facilitating a new way of collaboration of anyone in the world being able to make a piece of music with her voice. But then she would still have control and ownership over it. So it was really like a collaborative effort. How do you see collaboration between humans and AI? I guess maybe one thing I want to say here is that like, I wonder just, and that's a broader conversation right, who gets to collaborate with machines and who is getting extracted from machines? Because I've worked as a voiceover actress for years and I can tell that like, it even laughs. And like, many other places are just cropping from the internet. Like, it's just a free market. And then from time to time, you get artists who are like, I'm having this great conversation and, you know, grimes and who else? But I just think in general, like, maybe their protocol is interesting. But I do not really see their project as so liberative from like a bigger perspective. So I always like this idea of collaboration with AI. But I think that like only, unfortunately, only a few gets to like, have the proper sort of like contract. And most of other people like myself included are just getting ripped off of like their initial skillset. So I just wanted to put this out there because I think sometimes when people are quite famous and elaborated and, you know, renowned, they give a very interesting protocol examples. But I think it would be great if this was a little bit more like applicable to other people too. And I think in a lot of ways that was like the utopian fantasy behind crypto early on, right? Was that through tokens, you could like grant ownership and voting power and financial stake to everyone who had worked on a project or the whole community that made something, you know, take off. And that like didn't really bear out. Maybe it's still worth experimenting with. The technology is still around. But I think a lot of the utopian sentiment has probably been drained in view of like the crazy wealth creation mostly at the top that came from crypto like so many utopian financial efforts before it. I'm just thinking some of the collaborations just feel like, I mean, there was also this exo-capitalist and just kind of like pop it. I was thinking about it before. Like a lot of it feels ghost-like. It feels like necromancy, necrotech. Because I mean, a lot of the things that Holly Hernandez thing is an individual artist but we're talking about generalist collaborations. I mean, you're just sort of like probing the memory of everything in all artists. And it feels like you're having to re-animate a lot of things through your own volition. And I wonder more about like how that relationship can feel alive in the wrong ways. I think it's good to use new medium. It's good to learn it if you can. If you're alive at the time of when oil paint came in and you're a painter who would make sense to start using oil paint and see what's possible. To use these new tools, anyone can do that on a base level but on to kind of start making your own software or customizing. There's things you can vibe with code but to like really understand and it takes a lot of specialist knowledge. So it's actually, that's clearly not something that every artist or writer or you know, should be trying to customize these tools for their own use or try to make their own software or their own models. Which is something I think you're working on Chris. But it is, if you do have that specialist knowledge, if you do know how to do that stuff, and it's very exciting. I actually wasn't considering it from the tool-based perspective. I was thinking more somehow in the other form of collaboration just because we were talking about the artist. But I think that there is some sort of tool dimension of being able to create things that you can use for your own purposes, especially very custom automated processes that I think is maybe one of the most interesting use cases for some of this stuff I'm very empowering as an artist to realize some things that required a tool that you couldn't create on the computer. Have you guys vibe coded anything before? No, but I have a friend who's really like. I hung out with someone who's really deep in vibe coding his own art making software and it's pretty crazy. It kind of blew my mind when I saw what's possible. There is also an argument that the way various some digital culture happens such as like parts of NFT culture, such as things going on with AI, maybe even you know there's an idea that the people stealing your voice is actually a form of collaboration and that's how culture historically happened. There is the way of looking at it that this kind of big networked culture is much closer to the kind of historical model of what culture was and where culture came from to the model we have now where it's very much about the individual, like the individual maker, you own everything. Do you mean to say that collaboration has always been more co-terminous with extraction than we're really giving you credit for? I mean that's maybe not the terms I'd use, but yeah that sounds like. I just mean it's culture used to just come from everyone together anonymous people borrowing and stealing from, you know, but there's all sorts of folk cultures that are not based on the individual voice, the individual maker. Well in the spirit of collaboration let's get some more audience questions in here. I saw one in the front right here. Thanks I'm being definitely very much entertained by the talk and the discussion. I was thinking because there's so much focus on the image and its contemporary presence and its technological mediation. I was thinking about this shift and this period between early 2020's and then the development in AI. And I feel like there was something that just snapped between those like the first sort of moment and then like today where we are because it seemed like all the discourse and all the like image circulation was drive through like NFTs and like blockchain and its application to like artistic practices. But now it seems everything has shifted to AI. So we had like in 2020's we had like the vibe shift like early 2020's. And now it seems that things have moved to vibe coding. So my question is like has like the previous discourse and the previous practices that make use of NFTs, make use of blockchain, DAOs, Web3 and so on. Are they being overwritten by AI or are they somehow like mutually interacting and like mutually transforming? So this would be the question and then like on top of it I would love to ask what would happen if all of this evaporated and would this kind of like symbolic thinking that has been ingrained through our dependence on technology would still allow us to produce some kind of art without that technology from which it is dependent on. Thanks. I mean yeah I would say NFT art is over. I would not invest like I would be honestly like it will take a lot for that to come back but we'll see. And yeah I mean absolutely you can make art without any of these tools. But you don't need to use any of these tools to make art or live your life anyway. But I think it's more they just change the world in a way that's interesting. It's not to say like you need to or should even be using AI to make images at all but the way we like look at images and think about them and what images even are has changed very dramatically I'd say in the last 10 years, even very dramatically in the last couple of years. And that's super interesting. That's kind of relevant to anyone making or thinking about images regardless if they use, regardless if they touch technology at all or if they're completely against it. I think that was a great answer, I have nothing to add. I also want to add maybe that at the risk of something a bit conservatist. I also just think that there's like a great maybe like kinky pleasure we're just like going into the full process of things and actually like using some like cathartical energies and so into like making the products you want to make. I want to acknowledge the collaborations and the films that are possible with AI but I just think that there's something quite at least as I've experienced with writings. For example, writing is quite demanding and quite difficult thing to do. Also requires a lot of you depending on what you write, in general it demands a lot of you and I think that even though those drool exists and even though it might be, you know, seducing to just use them, to just shortcut to everything. I think there's just a great strategy that comes with shortcutting things like that. So when it comes to artistic practice, I believe that there's a great magic into actually doing the thing even though the market or the, I don't know, ideology would live in my nuts, say so. Yeah, Morgan, I'm with you on this, I think. And I love the second part of this question, especially what would happen if all of this evaporated? Would we still know how to make art? Would we still know how to think? My instinct is that the answer has to be yes. But then when I reflect on it, I'm not sure that's true. I teach undergraduates who don't really know how to write papers anymore because I think no sooner than you offload a skill like this. Does it just kind of start to waither? And we have to insist that these skills need to be like upheld and maintained. Like, we can't take for granted that the answer is yes, and I wish that weren't the case. I have a friend called Gabriel, who's a writer. Gabriel Smith is a novelist, a real novelist, published with Penguin. And he's found a way, he's kind of found a way using AI to make writing harder, which I think is really cool. And he's got like the AI can show you, you know, if you kind of get, I don't know, like how he's opened up, but it shows you like what word should come next, or what words can possibly come next, should come next. And it can also show you like what word maybe should have come before, or could possibly come before. So when he's looking at a sentence, who just get one word in his sentence, and they were like open up, he's like back and forward trees of everything that he maybe should have said before, it becomes this kind of like infinite permutation machine, you know, just be like staring at a sentence for days. It's very cool. Yeah, how do we build protocols for more friction, not less? Maybe that's the interesting question. All right, we have a really enthusiastic question way in the back. There's, yeah, I think. Hi, I'm surprised that in over an hour panel discussion on AI, none of you have brushed on the fact that AI has blurred the lines. AI disrupts the hierarchy, shortcuts from A to B, do you mean artists from working class backgrounds being able to finally implement their visualized ideas into reality? Because they can bypass the elitist hierarchy that the art world upholds. How is AI any different to big artists having the work produced in factories in China? Before AI, there was mood boards. That's exactly the same shit artists already stole other artist work even before AI. The protocol I suggest is working harder on your practice. The only way to reclaim agency as an artist is to explore and be yourself to the extreme fullest that an AI could never even replicate that. Why did none of you address that? I mean, I think I've actually. Also, I'm saying that because I'm actually a musician, so my future is even more fucked than yours. The first part of it before actually. So I don't like to repeat myself too much, but yeah, I think you're right. In the time when there's a great deal of worry about the cost of rent, and that has become too expensive for artists to live and to have studios, which is true or true to some extent, but at the same time, it is now possible to make things just on your phone. It was before AI as well, but it's possible to make work digitally for very little overhead other than the overhead you'd already need to live. But while that's been happening, while it is possible, as you say, there is this kind of leveling effect. It's kind of during this period that most of the art world, for the most part, does not want to exhibit digital art. So there is a leveling quality there. Of course, I understand there is. No, I know, I'm a green with you. And you know, like a standard that is upheld within the art world, but then your commentary on mocking, for example, looks maxing and not understanding that. For people who don't understand the concept of why looks maxing became so popular, it's because for once allowed people who don't have the privilege of spending 100K on procedures to, for once, be accepted in our superficial world where you're privileged because you are busy. beautiful, and that, for once, allows everyone to be on the same level, just as, you know, this huge online trend of peptides. Well, yeah, I mean, I, I don't think that logically holds up because peptides are. I know, that was just a joke. They're very expensive. And look, that was just a joke. But also, like, like, clavicular spends, I think he's from quite a well-off family, but he, he spent a lot of money on procedures and on drugs. So I, I don't think looks Maxine is very accessible, although, you know, working out and taking steroids is fairly like, it doesn't cost too much, but I think other forms, yeah, I agree technology can be leveling. But don't none of you agree that the beauty of AI is it allows people who never had access to the privileges that we have in the first world to actually attain the things that we take so much for granted? Thanks for your comments. I also think that's perhaps like what me and Adina just last we said about, like, indulging in the work of it was related to what you take the mic back. Yeah, what we were doing, what we're saying is that you actually indeed, as you said, have to work for it. We actually had this question, right, about like, the image and like, what you initiate right now about like, the idea of like, how does it give space for more people to create, more people to generate? And maybe it's more of a democratic tool indeed. We can have more comments on it. The only thing I want to say here is that like, it's true, gives more spaces for everyone, but at the same time I would still insist that it still rips and extract from a lot of people and it's only like big tech companies that are making most profit of it. So maybe there's like interesting and it's a complicated conversation to have about like, while it does give this democratic tool that everybody should have access to and everybody can create content, that's great, it seems to actually not, I mean, I will take a very basic example, but I think that a lot of people who were doing like text writing or creative directing or even music on like a quiet like, let's say moderate level are now being competing with machines. I will do it for free. And so I think that a lot of people who are also working in this industry, not being at all and at entities like standpoint are, you know, being asked to compete with machines which I don't think is so democratic also to, after all, like really like, the redistributive or generative in that way, but it's a complicated question, I think. I also say extract the West right now because like, it's heavily subsidized. So you should just like arbitrage anything you can get out of these systems while like these DCs are still paying for the majority of the resources, but also the people that are getting the most out of AI are spending a lot of money. We're kind of like stuck with the scraps still, but at least they're subsidized. So I say like, get whatever you can in the moment because I don't think it's going to last forever. I think maybe one more question. There's someone in the very last row whose hand just shot up faster than I've ever seen a human hand be raised. So let's wind things down with you back there buddy. >> Hello. Thank you so much for the panel talk, really, really brilliant stuff, totally unexpected. Thank you for the other question askers as well. I want to pick up on a strand that all of you guys mentioned at different points, and I thought it like maybe deserves some more consideration. That's AI in time or temporality, you know, in the discussion of protocol art and whether it's saying new or just like a sweet generous because I'm a kind of thing, pornography as well, how new is AI porn. When it comes to time and AI, I see a few of these contradictions, you know. It is the new wave. We have to adopt or be left behind and it recombines old things. That's what next token prediction is. It can make nothing new and yet it changes how we make everything. Beneath this, there's an assumption that AI is a break, a rupture, a disruption, whatever Silicon Valley PR term you prefer to use. And I was wondering if maybe we can understand AI but I'm unpacking this a little. What about all these continuities? To the neoliberal reign of singularities, all of us unique individuals here assembled with our unique personal styles, to Simultaneity, Contemporary. As you guys mentioned, there's a great discussion about contemporary Aryanity, both as an era and as a relationship to past eras that's Lionel Rufel's idea. To precarious labor and automation because as we all know, the whole point of AI is to replace workers. That's what they scare us with permanent underclass and so on and so forth. So my question to you guys is, how new is AI really? What is the new thing about it? What do we lose when we overlook continuities and the contradictions that these reveal and kind of adopt? Unquestioningly, this discourse of rupture and break. >> I mean, I guess to the point that I tried to raise earlier, I don't think that much of what's happening right now is in fact a break. I think it's sort of the eternally repackaged idea, whether it's systems art from the 1960s or the novelty of the computer, which has been the foundational lie of the tech demo since the advent of the tech demo. I think there's a great deal of continuity here, but still even in saying that, it strikes me that there is something kind of new in an inarticulable way. And maybe it's what we've been circling around here, but the kinds of images we were flashing on the screen as people filed in earlier seemed like something that could never have existed before. Maybe the veneer of the novelty of the image masks a kind of continuity of the system that creates it. Maybe that's dangerous, or maybe it just speaks something new that we just haven't figured out how to talk about yet, but I'm curious how the others relate to that. >> Thanks for the very elaborate question. I think for me, the only thing I can think of is just the pace of things. I think this is just encompassing a lot of things that have always been existing throughout times. In terms of rapture, discontinuity, automation, et cetera, I just think right now there's very little time to actually compute in our own brain what's going on, and I think it's going faster and faster. So to understand what's going on, what it's doing to our economy, to our psyche, which also we're trying to do today, right? Tomorrow it's already different, so I don't know, I think that perhaps, I mean, I'm not a historian, but I think that's really the thing that I see being the biggest challenge. It's like, how much can we keep up with it and actually make protocols, or novelty or conversation with it, because, you know, in two months it's already different. I also don't know how it is too much in a scientific world, but I think that also applies right. Life, how do you have a constructive critical engagement with the technology when it's being also developed in different ways, in different places? We live in this like globalized, competing world, so I don't know, maybe speed. >> I think like one different thing is the people who created this, it's never been so inwardly dog fooded before. I think a lot of other things have never had this sort of like rate of consumption with like CEOs getting completely scrambled and ruptured by their own product. And I think that's kind of a new thing that's happened. Compared to other maybe like technological moments, it's never been so inward to the people that are deploying it. They seem to be the most affected sometimes. >> You don't think Steve Jobs had like proto AI psychosis at the hand of his own beautifully designed world that he had dropped himself in? >> Steve Jobs. I don't think he had many devices of his self like his office was kind of messy. This is like the secret. He had a fake office and he had a real office and his real office was like books on a shelf, like some stuff, not Steve Jobs at all. There's a real man, work man, behind the whole. >> Well, thank you all so much for being here tonight. I've certainly learned a lot. I hope you've learned a thing or two as well. And we really appreciate your time and shared energy and presence as we continue to have some of these conversations that I hope will keep unfolding if we can keep up with what the heck is going on on the internet. I'm not sure if we figured it out, but the conversation continues. Buy the new issue of Spike, everything's computer. >> Thanks for listening to Spike's third round table at the Julia Stoshek Foundation Berlin. If you'd like to go deeper into the psychedelically pixelated present, order a copy of Spike's Spring 2026 issue, everything's computer via our webshop. While you're there, you can also subscribe to Spike for a full year. Choose our print quarterly or get access to our digital archive right up to the latest issue. For more conversations from Spike on the critical conjunctures in contemporary art, visual culture, and life online, subscribe to our feed on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or YouTube. This conversation was recorded on May 3, 2026. Sound and editing for this episode are by Sir and Hochberg. The theme music is from Seth Price's 2001 track, D. La Gwanne.