ies, to dance. Here, we’re speaking about something that is a little bit different, because of the fact that it’s a new human-machine hybrid that is being made on the factory floor every time somebody walks in. Rather than standing outside of some possible future, and observing that possible future play out in the form of a movie about another person, you’re becoming that hypothetical being, if only for a short period of time. You’re experiencing it in some internal way that genuinely changes who and what you perceive yourself to be. To me, that is less within the realm of amplification of abilities than it is about what happens when your experience of the world is shifted, modified or undermined. Think about another revolution that happened before the Industrial Revolution: the Copernican Revolution. That was, on one hand, a very humbling moment when we found that the earth was not at the centre of things. On the other hand, we realised that by virtue of this mediocrity of who, what and where we are in the solar system, anything we observe locally has significance throughout the universe. Suddenly, we could derive universal laws based on experiments done in the here and now. That’s extraordinarily empowering. The process of being humbled by the cosmos can also be a process of finding some other aspect of yourself that is ultimately greater than your self-centred individuality: a communal self that is essential to mutual tolerance and collective decision-making in a democratic society. Even if we are only humbled by the Mental Work machines, that may be profound enough. We desperately need humility. The degree of hubris with which we’re operating in the world today is absolutely toxic.
Michael There’s a certain contradiction to some of the advertising that we put out for the exhibition in Lausanne and on the web. We had slogans like “Stop Machine Domination” and “Join the Cognitive Revolution”, while at the same time the exhibit has a very capitalistic element: we want you to come in because we want your data, and 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 Tr