d your data has value. So you have this communist, Red revolution discourse on one side, and then you come in here and find, “Oh, they cheated and now I’m just going to give my data away.” That contradiction is part of the society we live in. In a data-driven society, technology companies are making products that continually harvest our data, and I think as a whole we’re not really taking into consideration the everyday “proletariat” and how they’re going to be affected by these advances in technology. There is a collective mentality among companies and many people which says that “The more data, any data that can feed AI, the better.” The technocratic class want people to participate as much as possible in the data economy, but we’re not necessarily giving them anything back for it. That is the underlying contradiction that our promotional campaign is trying to evoke.
Jonathon That rhetoric is completely consistent with the way in which most capitalist companies go about marketing themselves. Think about how Facebook purports to make the whole world one big community. The propaganda is usually disingenuous, and often contrary to what is really being achieved. So, by self-consciously mimicking corporate propaganda, there’s a socio-political dimension to Mental Work. On first encounter, it might be categorised as sci-art, in the sense of being a hybrid art-and‑science project. But I think sci-art is problematic as conventionally practised because it’s too strictly academic and often also lopsided. Sci-art all too frequently boils down to artists subserviently illustrating what the scientist is achieving, would like to achieve, or would like others to believe is being achieved. It’s just hyped-up data visualisation.
Michael The fact that these machines leave enough space for us to be able to think about the type of future we want to have with this technology means that they’re a good example of the convergence of art and science. We did an event, for instance, in which an actor read Etienne Bonnet de Condillac’s Traité des sensations, an 18th-century text within the Lockean tradition of empiricism. For empiricists, the world around you can only be described and experienced through your senses. This text describes, in a phenomenological way, the different experiences that you can have through smell, sight and hearing, and how you develop your personality and identity through memory of these. I thought that story had an interesting resonance with what we are doing here. These machines allow the general public to experience another capacity and go beyond the five senses that are tied to the physicality of our world. We can project ourselves into a machine using only our brain activity, which goes beyond anything that an empirical philosopher of the 18th century could have imagined.
Jonathon Which is not to say that our exhibition would have been completely unfamiliar to an 18th-century visitor. One of the inspirations for Mental Work’s machines in terms of their design was the Industrial Revolution. I started with 507 Mechanical Movements, a catalogue published in the 1880s showing many of the machines designed during the Industrial Revolution, from which we chose a few that were modified to operate in a more sculptural way. I based the designs on slider cranks: mechanisms that undertake calculations through their movement and geometry. These were the first mechanical computers and so they connect historically to the computers of the present.
Michael These slider cranks were used to help calculate ballistic trajectories so as to find better ways to eliminate the enemy. After the Industrial Revolution came industrialised warfare and one of the bloodiest centuries in history. We’re now seeing the same dangers surrounding warfare with artificial intelligence.
Jonathon Most technology has at least some military use, historically and in the present, and artificial intelligence is one example. Exploring military history was not really at the front of my mind while developing Mental Work, but it does seem in retrospect that the exhi