Zoe McCloskey: Pandora’s Box
Gray Area Incubator 2017
During my awesome time as an intern at Gray Area, I got to interview some really creative incubators. You might be asking, What is the Gray Area Incubator? Gray Area’s Cultural Incubator Program is a 6 month commitment to develop a project that applies art and technology for social and civic impact, Membership includes peer to peer support, shared workspace at the historic Grand Theater, and opportunities for public presentations.
Basically Gray Area finds amazing artist, creatives and technologist to make some cool projects.
If we can recognize the Western idea of progress as both finite and futile, perhaps we can escape it.
Here is an interview I did in Aug 2017 with artist Zoe McCloskey.
So what is the project you’re working on for the Cultural Incubator?
"My project explores how the incessantly inscriptive and totalizing nature of contemporary technologies have their roots in Greek myth and ancient artifact. The work consists of an approximately two foot tall Greek urn which displays a small touchscreen which facilitates a hybrid encounter between current and ancient technology.
The touchscreen leads the participant through a series of questions that suggest a linear, positivistic quest for knowledge that is then continually undermined.
Initially the viewer/participant is asked ‘Would you like to know what Automatons are?” If she answers “yes”; the answer is revealed. However, the screen then flashes a message telling the participant she has lost.
The urn, powered by a stepper motor attached to a photon (particle i.o.) controlled camera rig, then cracks slightly. Subsequent questions related to ancient myths, automatons, and cyborgs ensue on the screen, including quotes from Donna Haraway, Hannah Arendt and Mircea Eliade. But, the more the participant requests to “advance” or “learn” by obtaining answers, the more the vessel breaks apart, eventually separating into two distinct halves which clearly reveal the technological mechanisms of its insides.
Once fully apart, the game on the touchscreen becomes a new game which asks “What would you like to remove from the world?” Under the hood of the app is a file that saves all the user inputs and collates them into a list of top ten most requested elements. If the user’s answer is one of the most commonly entered, the urn closes back up slightly until it is again closed and the prior game resumes.
What inspired or influenced you to choose this idea?
There a few central ideas that influenced this project.
For one, I am fascinated by how quickly our social imagination jumps from the idea of code to ideas of cyborgian sentience. In learning programming it is somehow easy to jump from the idea of a simple LED blinking to the idea of a robot that thinks and moves.
Secondly, I was interested in exploring possible translations of contemporary A.l. via dead or dying languages. While researching this, I learned from a scholar on ancient languages that some academics consider Pandora the first cyborg. It was a pleasant surprise to me that the idea of a machine with sentience existed so far back in time, a collapse of the present and past.
Thirdly, I am inspired by the idea of undoing the past via the present. These ideas are present in certain beliefs in which shaman travel outside of space and time, and also potentially revealed on a nano scale as per some recent discoveries at CERN in which linear time breaks down. My long time favorite artist quote comes from a 2007 artist statement by Paul Chan in which he chastises young artists that think everything has been done, and suggests the importance of undoing.
It is fashionable today (still?) to claim that there is nothing new beyond our horizon of art, that everything worth doing has been done. But this seems to me an altogether specious claim, for it ignores the vast undiscovered country of things that ought to be undone….Perhaps the task of art today is to remake this burden anew by suspending the seemingly inexorable order of things (which gives the burden its weight) for the potential of a clearing to take place, so that we can see and feel what is in fact worthless, and what is in truth worth renewing. — Paul Chan
Does this relate to your interest in social practice?
The dominant discourse of the Bay Area seems to suggest that increased investment in the technological and the scientific will save us from all things that the technological and scientific brought upon us ( i.e. global warming, social isolation, vehicular deaths, lack of exercise etc.).
Though Hephaistos made Pandora out of clay, he was approached by the gods as the craftsman because of his skill in building Automatons (large metal creatures who could think and act). In our place and time, where hardware hacker labs and bio-hacking labs appear side by side, this shouldn’t seem strange. The Gods sent Pandora to man with a jar of negative things and a bout of curiosity as punishment for Prometheus stealing fire, an act that they feared elevated man to a God-like status. As we currently approach a preoccupation with technology rivaling that of Hephaistos -using CRISPR on human embryos, considering the threats of DNA malware, and engineering Wikipedia into trees-the contemporary echo of the origin of Western civilization portends its termination.
If we can recognize the Western idea of progress as both finite and futile, perhaps we can escape it.
What would define as success for your project?
My project would be a success if it manages to confuse and perhaps even frustrate people, but then prompts them to later reflect upon their experience.
Where do you see this project in five years?
On my bookshelf.
Will you still be working on this or will it be finished?
I hope it will be finished. ;P
What are your next steps, while the incubator comes to a close?
I would like to do a project looking into my neighborhood of the Mission, one which maps and translates the programming languages that people who live in this neighborhood are fluent in, along with the indigenous Mexican languages that are spoken by people here. I am also interested in making projects that consider the sentience of objects via augmented reality and which address ways to “heal” machines.
At the end of it all, Zoe finished her awesome piece ready to go for the show! It it was a smash hit!
