The Aesthetic Experience Of Technology
A Conversation with David Young
David Young is an artist and designer who lives and works between New York and Maine. His work, which employs cutting-edge technologies ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) to quantum computing, investigates our relationship with them through the filter of beauty and aesthetic experiences.
The interests of the artist revolve around perception, creativity and expression, while the work of art, in its creative act, becomes a way to reflect on the concepts of new and obsolete in the technological field.
In this interview the artist guides us in his creative world and shares his reflections on Web3, the Metaverse and the current state of the field known as Crypto Art.
Young’s work, which has appeared in numerous publications, can be found in private collections and is exhibited internationally, encountered the emerging world of NFTs in 2018. The artist has been featured among the 50 best Crypto Artists in the first Phygital Book “Crypto Art — Begins” by Rizzoli.
Beth Jochim (B): Your work relies on the use of cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing. As you investigate new forms of expression and creativity, you also highlight how aesthetics can offer us insights into technology itself. Can you guide us in your creative process?
David Young (D.Y.): I have always worked with emerging technologies and have been a big advocate that people should understand how they work, so they can have a say in how they are used and have some impact in shaping the future. However, modern AI and machine learning are radically different from anything that has come before. And so it’s really hard for people to get a sense of how it works. Instead, deceived by words like “learning” and “intelligence,” the technology is anthropomorphized and we imagine that its knowledge is correct and absolute. But it’s not. We now know that biased data leads to AI systems that perpetuate cultural prejudices and inequalities. And these systems are poised to exaggerate and optimize those injustices. Yet, due to the apparent mystery and mastery of AI, we are resigned to believing that this future is inevitable.
I believe that it is critically important for people to feel comfortable engaging with AI without requiring a technical understanding. And while I have previously engaged with other technologies from a position of technical mastery, my work with machine learning started with an intentionally non-technical approach. I wanted to find a way to use it, to make with it, and from that develop an intuition for how it works. And so I found some code online, got it to run, and started making art with it. I began experimenting with how this tool can be used creatively, feeling my way forward, gradually learning how to coax out results which I found interesting. My work with quantum computing has been following a similar path, again because the technology is so fundamentally different from what has come before. I work from intuition and I learn as I move forward.
B: Your work is based on a limited use of images and photographs taken and edited by you. In this way you ask the machine to construct its worldview and not to produce a perfect image. What are the implications of this approach?
D.Y.: So much of AI and its application is focused on business, consumption, scale, growth and efficiency, things that make us feel powerless. I want my work to exist in opposition to that. I want to imagine AI at an intimate and personal scale — something that we can understand and don’t feel threatened by. My work with AI starts with images of nature that I have taken or objects from nature, such as flowers, woods, landscapes, etc. I train the machine on these intentionally small collections of images. I use nature in contrast to business and I use small sets in contrast to the massive amounts of data used by big tech companies. I am constraining how the machine can operate as part of my process of searching for things that are unique about the technology. The result may be glitchy, but those imperfections reveal something about what is happening in the code.
I took this approach to an extreme with my “Tabula Rasa” (2019) works. I wanted to severely constrain the machine even more and train it with as little as possible. So I started with just a single solid color, and then two solid colors, to see if that gave any new insight into how the code functioned. I was surprised and amazed at the variety of images that resulted. They showed textures, patterns, even tensions, as the machine struggled to learn. They revealed a kind of “materiality” to AI, and provided a glimpse into the machine’s neural network. It would be technically “wrong” to say that they are a visualization of the network, but their aesthetic builds an intuitive understanding of what is happening in the code. By using this approach, my hope is to be able to make the strange errors and glitches of AI trained on extremely small data sets visible and communicate the inherent imperfections of the technology.
B: The theme of perception is central to many of your works including “Little AI” (2019 -2020), “Learning Nature” (2018–2019) or “Dandelions” (2020). However, other issues are also grafted onto it, for example the political one that deals with the themes of democracy, gun violence or abortion, as in “Flag”. If on the one hand, we find burdensome arguments, on the other the aesthetics of your works maintain elegance, lightness and in some cases become almost evanescent. What is the relationship between aesthetics and topics?
D.Y.: You’re right, perception is a key part of my work. With AI and machine learning we can never “open up” the neural network to see what the machine has learned, we can only guess at what it understands based on what it creates. I think it is fascinating to observe how the understanding of the machine, its perception or what it returns as output is so different from ours. Partly, this is because it has been trained on such small data sets and so it is very limited. But I also believe that the machine may be perceiving things in a way that is radically different from our human perception. For example, in my “Manipulations” (2020 — ongoing) works I further process the machine-generated images with my own code in order to reveal patterns (i.e.: textures, details, relationships, etc) that are otherwise invisible to us. We think that the machine is like us and sees like us, but these works suggest that is not the case at all.
Returning to your point, my work is not didactic and I am not trying to shout at the viewer my concerns about AI because the world is already noisy and painful enough as it is. Instead, I believe that beauty can be a way to engage people and I use aesthetic experiences like a Trojan Horse to attract the viewer and, hopefully, stimulate reflections and awareness about AI.
My “Flag” (2022) works are a little different because they are intended to be confrontational. Although they arise from a place of frustration and despair I haven’t totally given up on beauty as a means of engaging the viewer. And they relate to my other works because they are created using the same machine learning methods while leveraging output manipulations to reveal hidden patterns. So perception is still a part of these works. Your description of them as “evanescent” is closest to the spirit of what I am trying to do, which is to show a democracy that is collapsing and disappearing from sight, memory or existence.
B: Through the use of creative technologies you suggest the theme of time travel, addressed for example in the work “GR/HGR” (2021). Viewers find themselves reflecting on what is new and obsolete in the field of technology, but this conversation expands to touch the relationship between man and machine. Is there a golden age or has our relationship with technology always been complicated, reaching today such high peaks that are difficult to manage?
D.Y.: Perhaps it is just human nature, but I suspect that every age thinks it is the golden age — better than what came before. We privilege the present, racing forward to ”the new” with such gusto that we don’t question it. And, in the end, build a kind of unintentional future. I have seen this throughout my career : we thought that mobile phones would be freeing, but instead they make us feel isolated; we thought social media would bring out the best in people, but instead it threatens democracy. There is a long list of technologies that ended up being more harmful than good.
Having said that, in every era we create following the emotions of that moment. And the wonder and joy of creating with new technology can be quite real. When I first worked with personal computers, the technology referenced in the “GR/HGR” (2021) works, I was a teenager. I was mesmerized by what I could create by writing a simple computer program. The screen was an escape portal from my real world life, which was really difficult at that time.
So, these works are deeply personal for me. They are nostalgic for a technological wonder that I experienced — something that is much harder to experience as I age. They are a reminder that life can get better. They are an “ode” to naivety — both personal and technological. And a reflection that what we think of today as cutting-edge will soon be considered quaint and old-fashioned.
B: You are among the few artists currently working with quantum computing. By exploring this potentially radical technology, you are reflecting on the implications it may have on the nascent Web3. What are your thoughts about it, what direction are we taking?
D.Y.: Web3, NFTs, the blockchain — these are all the technologies of today. And, like I said, people have rushed to them. Just as I felt in my earliest work with technology, referenced by my “GR/HGR” works, there is a lot of fantastic experimentation and creativity happening right now. But it’s not going to last.
I say this not because of the recent crypto-crash, but because something else will eventually come, something new. That new thing might be something we can’t even imagine today. Or it might be quantum computing, because it could destroy the blockchain.
Destruction is perhaps too dramatic or theoretical, because quantum computing is still in its most nascent stage. But its development is a theoretical threat to the cryptography that makes the blockchain secure. With current computers it would take longer than the age of the universe to break the blockchain’s security. But when we reach “quantum supremacy” — that is, when quantum computers can outperform traditional computers — the blockchain’s security could be broken in just moments. It would render all of our NFTs to be little more than digital dust.
My “Quantum Drawings” (2021 — ongoing) are a reminder to the blockchain and web3 world that what they consider permanent and immutable could become obsolete overnight.
What excites me about quantum computing is the theory according to which every time the value of a quantum bit is examined, the universe is duplicated: in one universe the bit has value zero, in the second universe the bit has value one. This is the origin and the explanation for the multiverse and in the multiverse there is a separate universe for every possibility. I find this idea deeply optimistic because all futures are possible. So, somewhere there is a universe where Web3 lives up to all its promises. We just don’t know, yet, if it is our universe.
B: Your work is exhibited internationally, has appeared in numerous publications and is in private collections. You are now taking it into the world of NFTs. What are your impressions so far? Is the promise of decentralization coming true or will it remain a utopia?
D.Y.: When I first started making my work available as NFTs, back in 2018, there was an innocence to it. It was exciting just to be connected directly to other people who liked my work and wanted to collect it. There was a very strong sense of community and it was great. As things evolved, as the value of the works went up, and as more people got involved, there was a shift. Everything seemed so much more serious — or, at least, louder. And there was so much noise: on Twitter, in the press, everywhere. It looks like everybody has something to say and a lot of the negative behaviors from the traditional art world, from which we thought we were escaping, started to re-emerge. My work isn’t about NFTs, but uses NFTs as a way for collectors to connect with me directly. And I still love that. As for the promise of decentralization, I think it’s a bit of a techno-utopian vision. But we will have to wait and see.
B: There is a lot of discussion currently about what the Metaverse should or should not be. As an artist, how would you like it to develop?
D.Y.: It seems that most of the current visions of the Metaverse focus on creating virtual reality experiences that look a lot like the real world, but with the addition of a few more features. People want something super realistic, almost a faithful digital reproduction of our real world. And until we reach that level of graphical fidelity, we must be content with lower resolution and more clunky versions of the Metaverse.
Personally, I have never been particularly enthusiastic about photo-realism because, from a creative point of view, it seems to enter a dead end. Creating realistic 3D renderings is a technical and engineering challenge, but just an imitation. Why do we want to recreate the real world if we already have it? Why don’t we get sucked into pushing the imagination beyond the real world? I think we should be giving birth to something completely different, if we want the Metaverse to gain a deeper meaning. The real challenge is to keep the decentralized spirit of Web3 alive. And it will be difficult to do so, as big tech companies will develop their own Metaverse platforms in pursuit of their growth, sales and mass adoption goals. I hope that artists can imagine alternative visions that allow the Metaverse to develop away from the capitalist logic of consumption.
