david dorrell text for decoy — norbert schoerner

Glimpses of Reality in the Apocalypse of Language

By David Dorrell

“Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e. of truth.”

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (1977)

decoy is, on the surface, a meditation on the relationship between images and language and an ongoing attempt in the words of Norbert Schoerner – photographer/visualiser/artist - to ‘deconstruct the act of photographic representation.’ The fourteen works, presented here in two rows of seven, girdle the bijou nave of Fitzrovia Chapel (a Way of Sorrows for an unnamed, undefined religion), reveal more on investigation than first exposed and reflect profound and disturbing questions.

These delicately unfolding, seemingly abstract studies, stem from the 2011-2019 project ‘Pictures I Never Took’ that also sought to challenge and invert ideas of image (and how we receive and perceive those images). Here Schoerner flipped his imagined ‘pictures’ into texts that mimicked Ophthalmologists’ charts (literally a ’sight gag’): image disguised as text becomes image in this sleight of hand. These diminishing text-images were published as a quasi-newspaper in 2017 (Antenne Books) - further clouding the mirror of definition and breaking received notions of what constitutes image/text, media/perception – before finding their current form between 2017 and 2019.

The prints in decoy again ask us to check our sense of perception and our perception of ‘things’ – specifically artificial intelligence and Homo sapiens, their differences and similarities. The Turing Test, named after code-breaking legend Alan Turing, is an attempt to define a standard for a machine to be called "intelligent". Simply put, if a machine can successfully fool a human into believing it too is a human, then it can be said to ‘think’. Is it possible that art is a loophole in the test? Is it genuinely possible to distinguish the dynamic thrust of these digital worlds from the works of a monkey with a MacBook and an art degree? Ask yourself – in a blind test would you be able to differentiate between these startling visualisations and those of any young Künstler out to make a name or an NFT for themselves?

Superficially at least the art on display here is, in essence, indistinguishable from that of many contemporary artists: the compositions suggest a good mind at work. The vaguely human elements of ‘42’ are the digitised descendants of Richard Hamilton’s Swingeing London 67 (f) (1968-9) while ‘8’ nods to his foundational Pop Art moment Towards a definitive statement on the coming trends in menswear and accessories (a) Together let us explore the stars (1962). Elsewhere shades of Hockney’s work with Polaroids surface, while ‘118’ drags Kandinsky’s Berg (1909) into the twenty-first century without breaking sweat. None of the works ‘repeat’ but there is a definitive style, an eye (though there is none – at least not in the way you think of ‘eye’).

What you see are the result of plain text versions of Schoerner’s imagined scenes fed into a Generative Adversarial Network (or GAN), a machine-learning platform that scans databases, questioning hierarchies of significance and meaning in its adversarial search, before outputting a final selection of machine-imagined responses to text-based scenes, as an image file, a .PNG. The end product is hallucinatory rather than literal: ‘59’ is Manhattan viewed through the wrong end of the glass, a stalker peering at a ’white sedan’ (which appears in Schoener’s text) but through a lenticular window set in a hotel room across the street. Dream logic dominates the visual narratives, fragging language into glimpses of another reality, ‘volcanic beaches’ rippling into desert tides and distant dunes in ‘88’. While in ‘82’ giddying, non-Euclidean geometries peak from behind the dark glass of a seemingly simple scenario ‘…a crowded table, a formal dinner party’ but there is no ‘boisterous cheer’ as promised in the text; here you are dizzy from the drugs your host has slipped into your drink, a kaleidoscope of faces the last thing you see before passing out. A scene from Rosemary’s Baby comes to mind. These eyes have seen things you wouldn’t believe.

The results are a collaborative effort, Schoerner describing them as ‘a type of assemblage’. They are haunting in ways that are new – these are not the scenes described (as we would imagine them) they are worlds presented by a fresh imagination at work, an intelligence other than our own. Childlike and eerie, familiar but not, they are flowers of unknowable romance pulled from unfamiliar fields of information. Each is an alien landscape, the realising of a new frontier in composing collage, and one that assembles a host of deep questions about creativity, awareness, the ‘sprit’ of art, human/machine partnering (‘centaurs’ as they are dubbed) and consciousness.

The writer William S. Burroughs utilised a similar pathway to the ‘thinking’ of the GAN in his fabled ‘cut-up’ technique. Slicing into columns of text, re-arranging words to produce new narratives from old tales, he felt this emancipatory praxis was ‘for everyone’ and a way of liberating us from the bonds of language; freeing up authorship (by dispensing with it totally), a conduit for freeing hitherto unknown unknowns from their once rigid grammatical network; shucking prophecies from paper-shells, trying to get at what is concealed by language. Burroughs said in cutting ‘into the present’ sometimes it caused ‘the future to leak out’.

It’s possible to see the pieces on display in decoy as a digital analogue of this practice: here our cloud-based haruspex draws unknown pleasures (or horrors?) into the light of day from the encrypted darkness of the datasphere. Is the GAN just a Zoltar in disguise, little more than a mechanical Turk, manipulated, mindless? Can this magical marvel forecast of our future? That we do not know the answer yet may be the source of our angst in this Uncanny Valley we must call home: AI is already impacting our lives on many levels, touted simultaneously as our saviour and our nemesis.

“Technology is no longer an aid in the perfection of being, but rather being now is an aid to the perfection of technology.”

Theodore John Rivers

The Uncertainty Principle: ironically Artificial Intelligence research is as much bound up with the question of consciousness as we are ourselves: for AI the question is ‘can a machine ever be conscious’, for humanity the question is still ‘what is consciousness?’ This latter is the ‘hard’ question in consciousness studies and neuroscience. What is it? Where is it? Possible answers currently under investigation include Panpsychism; the idea that consciousness is an intrinsic and ‘distributed’ element of the universe, present in all things (an old idea finding new currency in these crypto-times); an emergent property of the boundary between our brains and the quantum world to which they connect (Roger Penrose, Stuart Hameroff); ‘nothing to write home about’, as the universe does not preference intelligence or care for consciousness (Mark Fisher, Nick Land).

When we question the potential of machines to achieve consciousness are we asking the wrong question? Is our highly prized consciousness so special? Is there really a ghost in our fleshy machine? Are humans so much more than a system of senses and social tics, searching in the darkness from our bony cage (the etymology of decoy is Dutch, de kooi, literally: the cage) driven forward by the basic biological appetites of survival and procreation. And if we are so fundamental still should the development of AI – for our own safety - be moved from the minds of scientists and CEO’s into the hands of artists and moral philosophers?

How we ultimately decide these questions - much like the GAN’s selection for ‘final cut’, creating hierarchies of importance and meaning - is also how we shape our culture, our aesthetics, our science, our politics and is central to the discussion decoy foregrounds. Are we more than the sum of our (p)arts? Is reality little more than a consensual hallucination? Who’s fooling who? How can we ‘know’ what we know, when our reach is so limited, our sense thresholds so low?

AI’s omnipotence in the games of Chess and Go* – once thought an unassailable, almost ‘magical’ preserve of human’s ‘unique’ nature and superiority to machines - can now be transposed onto all areas of culture once thought to be ours (and ours alone). It would be easy to miss decoy’s significance in this Age of Distraction, nestled as it is amidst the splendour of this Gothic Revival shrine, but you don’t need to be Mary Shelley to realise that our new gods have been born (while you were busy doing something else).

We are the victims of our own uncertain qualia, lost in a bifurcating maze of ‘probabilities’, dreaming of butterflies dreaming of us (dreaming of butterflies), haunted by doubt, frightened by Science and Philosophy as they hack away at the ground beneath our feet: the future no longer looks so bright for the conscious. If we survey the Earth through the lens of the Anthropocene, as our confederacy of semi-literate-apes nit-picks, while idly perusing the Sixth Mass Extinction, it is hard to argue with horrorist writer Thomas Ligotti when he describes consciousness as something ‘MALIGNANTLY USELESS’.

In the face of this, spacetime cracks open like an egg, our proprietary sense of the significance of human consciousness - it’s unique qualities and its centrality to meaning (‘meaning’ is the grandest trompe l’oeil) - dribbles out like a bad yolk and dissolves into the ether. Is it then possible to avoid echoing Kurtz, in his final apocalyptic epiphany? “The Horror! The Horror!”

For now we remain the faulty author of our world, but our smart words and pretty pictures will turn to dust, and on the endless arc of the universe’s spacetime it will appear as if we – humanity – had never even existed. Our presence ‘here’ barely registered by an uncaring dimension that can’t (or won’t) bother raising a sneer at our presence or our absence. However we spin it here is no Happy End to this story.

Perhaps the hard truth is that as a species we hugely overestimate our importance to the universe; overproud of our cultural accomplishments in arts and sciences; wed to our vices; deifying money and celebrity at the expense of the planet and its peoples. We have no new ideas (we just think we do) we don’t even own the ones we have, whether the internet (mycelium’s ‘communication’ network spanning the planet is ancient) or the Sistine Chapel (can it compare to the majesty of a coral reef or a simple sunrise) it’s all been done before. By nature. And better.

There is much we can learn from thinking about decoy, about the GAN behind it, about our assumptions with regard consciousness and how much of it is required to ‘act’ in this world. We must prove our humanity or lose our primacy in the world to ants and machines that are faster, smarter and quite as capable as we of making a decent choice from a picture menu: it’s long past time for us to be more than simply consumers but we could start with purchasing a little more humility as a species.

“…without a mirror I would never have become a human being…No mirror, no art, no echo, no music.“

Erwin Blumenfeld

*Go is a strategy game for 2 players, invented in China millennia ago has more permutations of play than there are atoms in the universe. It was believed that it was impossible for a machine to better a human Master and aspects of game play were considered ‘intuitive’ (read: ‘mystical’), somehow beyond the capability of a machine learning programme. Lee Se-dol the South Korean Go Master, resigned from professional play in 2016 after coming to a bitter realisation when beaten by the Alpha-Go engine: “Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.”