Meet u2p050, creators of PORN-O-TOPIE
For the release of their PORN-O-TOPIE NFT collection with Cayus54 that explores the production of porno images with AI and other technologies, the machine-enterprise u2p050 answered our questions about their projects, their vision, their inspirations and their future.
u2p050 is a machine-enterprise born in 2019 that explores the relationship between philosophy, technology, art and science, and highlights new ways of producing conceptual thinking.
The members work together as the gears of a single machine. u2p050 aims to show that concepts exist not only in books, but in other forms of expression like image, sound, performance, machines and devices. The word “u2p050” is the name of a part of a machine and has been randomly chosen by an algorithm among other names of parts of a machine. This choice of name symbolizes the approach of u2p050: machines, concepts, art and technology interpenetrate each other. Even though humans can think and create concepts, the technology and mediums used to produce these concepts participate in their production and conceptual thinking is therefore not only determined by humans.
Who are the members of the project?
Our artistic entity is a machine-enterprise, no individual stands out. We want to get out of the collective model in art, which we consider too flimsy and individuality focused. The enterprise model has a monetary and legal dimension that requires a long-term commitment. We want to get away from a certain purity of art and consider the political organization of work as a way of creating art, a relational art that puts everyone on an equal footing. There is a constant exchange of functions within the organization and all members of the company are producers of the artistic concept and production, from the inception to the video.
u2p050 is an enterprise that could be described as “useless” because its vocation is to produce art, and it is therefore outside the utilitarian vocation of capitalist production. As a continuation of this entrepreneurial approach, we were thinking about a project in which we include certain elements of the business, such as accounting for example, as aesthetic objects.
How did you meet and create this project?
We have known each other for a long time. However, we didn’t have a precise idea from the start, this machine-enterprise was created through exchanges and from a common desire to do something.
Why is the machine-enterprise called u2p050?
u2p050 is the name of an electronic component of a machine. We asked an algorithm to randomly choose one of the names of the components of a machine, and that’s what we got. So we’re in this cog, the machine chose it.
Why are you interested in the relationship between philosophy, art and science?
Today, there is a rather radical interpenetration between these fields. A technology relays both a way of life and a certain aesthetic. All social networks carry a certain aesthetic and a mode of display, which is also a specific implementation of the code and social relations that govern us. In addition, there are several other levels, such as the legal level. All these levels that used to be separated in our society are now completely mixed up. It is no longer possible to really focus on one level and not the other. For example, if you want to write a text, you’ll write it in Word, which depends on a set of functions and machines and will determine your writing. This relationship between machines, writing or even typography is very important for us.
Do you think this phenomenon of interpenetration of fields is particularly important today?
Today, you can no longer do philosophy by writing in a book. To question the possibilities of contemporary conceptual thinking, you have to leave the book, question and navigate in the multimedia, the computational. This is essential and requires the mobilization of new technologies.
What is your approach?
Our common thread is the documentary on which we have been working since the beginning of u2p050. This project questions the relationship between conceptual thought and technology and crystallizes our idea of being a philosophical and audiovisual production machine.
We meet designers, scientists and philosophers, therefore human subjectivities, which we connect with machine subjectivities, like our 3D creation tools and the Touch Designer software. We want to break down the myths that exist in technology today and to understand the meaning of the machine and what artificial intelligence really is.
We interviewed artists who use artificial intelligence and who helped us to question and deconstruct it, interface designers who want to be critical, Alain Damasio, a writer specialized in science fiction, philosophers like Anne Sauvagnargues, who are very close to the trends of philosophy to which we are sensitive like Deleuze and Guattari. This documentary is our common thread and artistic projects like PORN-O-TOPIE intervene during the production of this documentary.
Can you tell us about the PORN-O-TOPIE project?
PORN-O-TOPIE is our first exhibition. The images of the project are generated by artificial intelligence from a database of more than 3,000 images of gonzo porn. PORN-O-TOPIE travels in time between the media of porn distribution and questions their role in the production of porn. We exhibited these images in a Parisian sex shop. We reinterpreted these AI-generated images in 3D to create the NFTs we are selling with Cayus54. We are also working on a VHS collection.
We want to have sound content that is different from what we can normally hear. For PORN-O-TOPIE, we recorded the sound of the hearts of two people making love, which are sounds that inhabit us without us being aware of them or exploiting them. We developed a stethophone, with a stethoscope, silicone and a transmitter. We like to rehabilitate and divert techniques for artistic use.
The soundtrack that is played at the PORN-O-TOPIE exhibition is composed from A to Z. An algorithm has cut a soundtrack and generated others from the original. The creation process is done as a duo with the machine. When the machine is running and creating, we are always behind it adjusting, setting volumes and cutting things.
What other projects have you done as part of u2p050?
We made a short documentary about the relationship between intimacy and festivals, in the context of an electronic music festival. We also made a cinema-concert with Anne-Charlotte Finel and Voiski. We created 3D visualizations of Anne-Charlotte Finel’s images and reinterpretations in the form of point clouds of tidal bores. For our sound documentary project Globale Sécurité, we went back to the origins of bertillonnage, the facial identification systems. We wanted to see what would happen if we removed the images of the demonstrations and only listened to the sounds. Adrien made a short film “Bucaquoi”. We also made an album of random music called “Aleator”.
We have several projects in progress, including Protozoa, which is made of 6 dance films produced in collaboration with Sonal Sinor, for which we used the stethophone in the musical composition and clothes with green modular fabric.
We are also starting a collaboration with the Ecole Normale Supérieure with whom we developed an interface to show the graphic visualization of scientific research. This is part of our desire to get out of the book, we are also getting the researcher out of the linear Powerpoint format to experiment with other types of visualization.
For each of our projects, in the final output we mix the sound, the image, and the text of philosophy.
What techniques do you use to produce and why?
We believe that concepts are always produced in an interrelation between technical devices and users. Any technical practice eliminates and creates different ideas. For example, the software allows us to create a closer and faster visualization of ideas, it both eliminates and produces possibilities. There is a constant feedback loop between the user and the machine or software. We wanted to explore as many different interfaces and mediums as possible, to see what ideas emerge. We use Touch Designer as our main software for developing projects. It is a visual programming interface that allows for complete modularity.
What is your project Milkyway?
We went to meet a farmer in his dairy farm, we scanned his farm and his cows in 3D and we recorded the heartbeats of the calves and the trees. We don’t know the final form of the film yet, but we want to create a short film of anticipation of a world in which men would have disappeared and there would be only cows and the machine which would interact. In a somewhat apocalyptic world in which there would be no human mediator, how does the cow, the main character whose perception we have, see herself in relation to the technical apparatus? How do they interact?
There is often chance and randomness in your productions, why? Will this be the case for Milkyway?
In our projects, we often use chance and randomness. In finite machines as we know them, chance is impossible because they have a completely finite number of states. Even if the number of possibilities of the machine seems enormous and disproportionate, it will never be completely random, it is a closed circuit. The real randomness is in the living, that’s why we will go back and forth between the two for Milkyway. We will work on a device of sensors that we will install in the farm so that we can hear the events of life in the farm at a distance, from the exhibition. This will allow us to capture a hazard much closer to the living because the life of the cows cannot be predicted in an exact way.
What do you think of the mediums and ways to express conceptual thinking that exist nowadays?
We believe that conceptual thinking is no longer determined solely by human subjectivity. The mediums are important because they participate in the production of conceptual thinking.
For example, with PORN-O-TOPIE, we wanted to question the history of the media of diffusion of porn. We realized that the creation of gonzo was done in parallel with a certain technology, the portable camcorders. This new form of formalization of porn existed because there was this new technology. The emergence of the Internet made this form of porn obsolete: the shots and the visualization of the commercial sexual act changed. We question this dialogue between mediums and how to update and talk about these old mediums with contemporary techniques like artificial intelligence.
So the machine produces conceptual thinking as well?
We consider that these elements are on the same level: animal thinking, human thinking and machine thinking. In the past, animals were identified with machines, so being interested in animal thinking is also wondering if machines are capable of thinking. Are they capable of thinking in a different way than men? Can we put them on the same level in the production of conceptual thinking?
What are your sources of inspiration?
The inspiration comes from within the machine-enterprise. Discussions between the members are a big source of inspiration.
We have a relationship to the documentary that is close to Chris Marker’s. Our desire to create a machine-enterprise is close to the work of Warhol and Cattelan. Chatonsky is a digital artist who influences us in the way he formalizes his images. Many members of the machine-enterprise party in electronic music circles, this creates another relationship to the machine than the productive and utilitarian one. Berni Krause is a master of the recording of the living who inspired us to record the sound of trees. John Cage is also a great inspiration, he conceptualizes music and silence in music. The work of Baptiste Morizot, an author of philosophy who has tracked down wolves and tried to understand the interrelation between humans and animals, really influenced us. Like Baptiste Morizot who tries to understand the non-human, we confront the human with the machine to understand this interrelation and its effects, as well as what the machines produce in the real and how we fit into it. In terms of philosophy, we are interested in Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Michel Foucault.
Is there an artwork or an artist that has particularly moved you recently?
Cyprien Gaillard filmed a 3D fireworks display with a drone with a music of Alton Ellis, it really moved us. We found Peter Watkins’ documentary “La Commune” very interesting as it questions contemporary media with communist TV and radio. There is a double temporal relationship which is very beautiful. The Opera Calling experiment interested us a lot: people from Zurich installed microphones in an Opera house and randomly called phone numbers in the city of Zurich to broadcast opera.
Why do you want to create art in the form of NFT?
The way we work naturally leads us to this kind of distribution. Before NFTs, there were not many ways to sell digital art. We are also from our time, it is not a coincidence if we have this practice now and that the NFTs arrive. NFTs are also going to be a field of exploration to create philosophical content and play with the blockchain’s protocols.
What are your future projects?
u2p050 will always remain at the crossroads between philosophy, cinema, contemporary art, sound creation, always in indeterminacy. u2p050 is also a political machine-enterprise. As individuals in a world of unbridled capitalism, we want to create a perennial machine-enterprise, out of which we can make a living. We also want it to be a political experiment, with the possibility of recruiting people without diplomas, totally different people, without preconceived ideas of what their participation in the machine-enterprise could be. Plug them into the corporate machine and see what happens. By being a limited number, our ideas are also limited in our own individuality. Our goal is to grow, keeping this anarchic spirit.
