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- [00:01]
A
Like, one of the natural properties of AI models is they can produce near infinite stuff.
- [00:05]
B
Yeah.
- [00:05]
A
Right. And so people are like, well, what does an image mean? And you're like, well, from a certain perspective, this is a bit of a crisis. Right. You can produce a gajillion images on the same seed or whatever. Right. But from another perspective, which I think is very common in a contemporary art tradition, it's not a problem at all, because all you do is you're asked to move up one layer of abstraction. Who now has anything to say about the deindustrialization of this country?
- [00:55]
C
Georgian townhouses on the moon, the highest
- [00:58]
B
GDP per capita in the Milky Way.
- [01:00]
C
Small modular reactors under every village.
- [01:02]
B
Green, this is Anglo Futur.
- [01:25]
C
Viewers. Welcome back to the Anglo Futurism podcast. You might notice something a little different about our thatched space station.
- [01:32]
B
We are here in the sister station to our own one, Harriet Green's station that she has kindly lent us whilst ours is being refurbished.
- [01:41]
C
So Harriet, our new landlady, will be putting out lots of other interesting shows coming soon, so keep an eye on that for the time being. We are welcoming to the anglofuturism podcast, Matt Drihurst. Matt, welcome.
- [01:54]
A
Hello. Nice to see you.
- [01:57]
B
Matt is an English conceptual artist. You are unfortunately based largely in Berlin.
- [02:02]
A
Yes.
- [02:03]
B
You've expressed that. Actually, you have not spent very much time living in Britain.
- [02:07]
A
Not at all. About three and a half years of my 41 years, so.
- [02:11]
C
Yeah, but it's too late now. You're in low earth orbit. We've got you for a couple of hours. We're going to ask you about aesthetics, art, technology, the future, football, choral music, all these very important things.
- [02:24]
B
But first of all, so our station is being redecorated. Why would it not be? Because this is obviously my aesthetic preference. Why would it not be a good idea to just put up Greek statues of ourselves, you know, marble, muscular, bound. I think.
- [02:38]
C
I think maybe from the waist down.
- [02:40]
B
Callum. Yeah, alright.
- [02:42]
A
I mean, why? Why would you do such a thing?
- [02:46]
B
Well, because.
- [02:47]
A
Does it not feel anachronistic and kind of kitschy?
- [02:50]
B
It does. Bit paper wave, but that's what everyone says. And actually, you know, we should reject the criticism of pastiche and we just need to say, you know, no, it's fine. These were beautiful once. They are beautiful now.
- [03:04]
C
We have decided on this podcast that pastiche is no longer a slower word and we're going to use it as a sign of approbation, I think, for totally reactionary art.
- [03:14]
A
Sure. I just disagree with or it's fine it's just a very boring choice. I mean, I also think if you're gonna go back and think about that period of art, if you wanted to be even more kind of, you know, bold with it, you would paint them. I don't know. If you saw. There was these amazing exhibitions where they were trying to revive the original paint jobs on a lot of these kind of beautiful marble sculptures, and they actually look really gaudy.
- [03:40]
B
Yeah, These are the ones that are even more kitsch, though.
- [03:42]
A
Yeah. So I would lean into that. Like, there's all kind of ways you could possibly do it, but this kind of Ladean, kind of, you know, very, very elegant kind of kitschy. It's. I don't know. Yeah, it's a bit vaporweave.
- [03:53]
C
A bit.
- [03:54]
A
A bit YouTube kind of 2010 or something. I'm not pro.
- [03:58]
B
I've heard, though, that actually, those colors are not actually representative of what they would have looked like. But that is just like, base coats, right?
- [04:06]
A
That could well be the case, but by all means, paint them. No, I know this is a politic, too, because you see it. It's like in San Francisco, you get chancellors who are playing on this very naive understanding of aesthetics. And have you seen these, like, French guys?
- [04:19]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [04:20]
A
There's like, a team of French guys who are like, we are master sculptors from Paris.
- [04:23]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [04:24]
A
And they're trying to build, like, a Goliath in the Bay Area. And I'm like, no, like, if you want it to be more interesting and contemporary, like, I actually kind of love the organic nature of Burning man aesthetics. Like, you should have just a giant Burning man in the San Francisco Bay Area. There's all kind of new monolithic things you could do. I just. Yeah, I don't know. It's not.
- [04:45]
B
So I think this. This is the problem, right, is that we are stuck at a moment where what. What could be new and what could define what the look of the next kind of 20, 30 years feels to many as kind of too modern, you know, horrible, disgusting, objectionable. And so people have kind of gone back and tried to find things that are based and trading.
- [05:13]
C
People have always liked. People always liked art that's based and tradable, just seem normal to them. We've had so much turnover in, I suppose, civilizational aesthetics and the art we produce over the hundred years or so that the normal reflex to enjoy traditional things has been unfairly castigated as reactionary or plebeian.
- [05:32]
A
Well, so correct me if I'm wrong. This is the Anglo futurism. Podcast.
- [05:36]
B
Well, so there tends to be one more angler and one more futurist.
- [05:41]
A
Again, I have nothing wrong with it, but does that not connote a certain stuckness?
- [05:46]
B
Right.
- [05:46]
A
I mean, the thing is about aesthetics is that they're emergent, right? People treat art history as if it was always so. And actually a lot of these techniques, like perspective, was a scientific discovery. The idea of being able to carve something to be accurate was a great accomplishment of its time. And so if you're wanting to kind of pay homage to the great accomplishments of the time, it seems a bit weird to do that with a thousand year old technology that you can automate. That seems like. But I mean it looks good. Fine. But in terms of the arts or kind of investing any kind of, any kind of hope in an emergent new future, bountiful future, it seems kind of banal to do that. I don't know.
- [06:31]
B
This is the problem, isn't it?
- [06:32]
C
This is why we have a thatched space pub.
- [06:33]
B
This is why this is the problem is that the corresponding effect of Greek statues and whatever is a stuckness that for many there is this feeling that we're just not making anything new. That we are stuck in the constant now and no one has been able to find some thing that can drive us forward. Right. And that we are kind of stuck in the. In the eternal September that is just forever going to be. People are just unsure. I mean, maybe we could talk about then about the art that you are actually, you are curating and also showing off some of your own work in Venice at the moment, aren't you?
- [07:13]
A
I am, yes.
- [07:14]
B
Do you want to tell us about that?
- [07:16]
A
Sure, yeah. It's certainly not marble sculptures. My wife and I have been working on a kind of thesis about art we've called Protocol Art. It kind of came up over time and we had a show at the Serpentine a few years ago. We're very close collaborators with Hans Eric Obrist, the Swiss kind of super curator. And the opportunity came up to do a show in Venice with the Berggruen Institute, which is a really interesting organization. They've done done a lot in the realm of philosophy and the sciences. Bergeron's kind of a patron of a lot of interesting things. And they were like, yeah, do you want to do a protocol art show here? And so we said yes. And yeah. The basic idea there is to invite in people creating protocol work. By my definition that includes a lot of people who have gone through maybe the art school trap, like path trap. The art school path or traditionally show works in exhibition format. Maybe what's slightly strange about the show is that we also curated biologists, computer scientists there, and are showing their work on Evil, Evil Trap. You do it exactly on an even footing with the artists there, because part of the thesis generally is that the autonomy of art, at least this is my argument, the autonomy of art, which is this kind of post enlightenment ideal that, you know, art is separate. It's a separate category from everything in life. I think that ended probably about 20 years ago. And I think we're not properly. We haven't properly reconciled that fact. And so I'm mostly interested in people who are creating or orchestrating works that end up having these downstream aesthetic effects. But the work is in the conceptual layer. The work is in the orchestration or. Or the development of tools or the development of strange rules. The show's called Strange Rules.
- [09:08]
C
What's it like to be there? What would someone see and hear?
- [09:12]
A
There's a whole bunch of stuff. I mean, we have a piece in there where we're basically making like a BitTorrent network for context, if you want to get into it. We built. It's like a mirrored parliament, a really large mirrored parliament where people are invited to debate and agents ingest everything that happens in the room. They can literally ingest 100 people at a time and then debate and contribute to that corpus of information. In parallel, there's a friend of ours, Josh Citarella, and new models, who made this really interesting kind of. They call it the marketplace of online ideas. And it's basically like a weird gas station store where they bring all the various different ideological, competing ideologies online and all their merchandise into one room together, which weirdly turns out to be like the best franchise store that doesn't exist yet. It's kind of like Hot Topic, but for like. And they're. They're doing interesting things where they're looking at how, you know, like a Sam Harris podcast and the Young Turks use the same stock imagery for their T shirts. So, like, on opposing walls you see exactly the same T shirt, except one of them says, like, whatever Sam Harris podcast is. And one says, like the Young Turks, and brings in a lot of just like different subcultural stuff that you rarely get to see in one space. Together we have Michael Levin, who we curated the Great Biologist. We have live worms that we persuaded to grow two heads.
- [10:36]
C
How did he persuade?
- [10:37]
A
So his protocol.
- [10:39]
B
Very convincing.
- [10:40]
A
Yeah, so Levin. Yeah, exactly. So Levin. Levin's fascinating, really recommended Deep Dive on him. But basically when he Looks at humans and he looks at animals or rocks or plants. He's like, from a hard biological sense, it's really difficult to disambiguate what we are versus what they are. Our understanding of what a human is is very much limited to our optics, right? So like Descartes could look so far and then he tried to identify an area of the brain. He's like, no, that's what makes us different to animals. And he's like, well, at this point in time we have all the optics you can imagine. And with D deep learning, you can see further than microscopy. Quite. Where we end and where other things begin is really a philosophical question, because actually we're just like weird markets of cells. So to him everything is a protocol communication issue. So how do you communicate with other living things? He looks at bioelectricity and uses bioelectricity to persuade a worm who is going to grow one head, two heads. And we think this takes on a kind of mythological valence. So we have the two headed worms there where you can see, and we shoot them, kind of like cinema. We have a work from Ken Stanley, who's a computer scientist who I really admire. He's kind of like the godfather of open endedness research and machine learning. It's like mutating strange new. It's basically an early AI experiment from the early 2000s. Yeah, a bunch of artists. Trevor Paglen has a work there where he's hypnotizing people. Avery Singer, the great painter, has a work there. So that there is. There are also people from traditional gallery representation. But it's a strange show. And more or less the premise is that when it comes to the arts, I think we generally, and this is inside the arts and outside the arts, have a rather reactionary understanding of what art is.
- [12:26]
B
And yet you're looking at it.
- [12:29]
A
But yet. When we were doing the. The research for the show, we started with the provocation, speaking to people and saying, hey, I think the most consequential actors of our day when it comes to culture, when it comes to aesthetics, are programming the systems we use. I think that the people programming the rules and incentives of Instagram have a larger cultural impact than any one person who's posted an Instagram square. Nobody disagrees with me.
- [12:57]
B
Nobody disagrees with me in the sense that all the images post posted on Instagram and the levels to which they are visible form by itself an artistic product or an artist.
- [13:09]
A
And this is the thing, it's up for us to debate what is art or not. I Find it easier and cleaner to look at a figure like Dom Hoffman. I don't know if that name rings a bell, but Dom is an artist who created vine. And vine is a system of constraints deployed to the network, to everyone's phone, or where he said, look, you only get to shoot six second videos. Here's the editing logic, here's whatever. It spawned all these different subcultures. It basically spawned contemporary visual communications, if you think about shorts culture and TikTok and so on and so forth. And that all comes from someone treating a protocol or a series of instructions, basically through software, as an art project, as a material that is inherently networked. And I think that the interesting dilemma. I'd love some pushback on this, but the interesting dilemma is just because we're not used to calling this art doesn't preclude it from being art. Just because it's quite difficult to tell if the person, you know, orchestrating Instagram is putting as much authorship into it as I would argue Dom Hoffman did with vine doesn't mean it's not art.
- [14:19]
C
All these kind of extractive programmatic bits of software and the aesthetics or what arises visually, it's just an epiphenomena. Yeah, well, I suppose maybe that doesn't matter to Totally.
- [14:33]
A
No, but that's. But it's uncontroversial in contemporary art, for example, to set up an installed environment in which there are no predetermined outcomes. In fact, that's the alibi of the MoMA, right? The alibi of contemporary art, conceptual art generally, is that you set up a space to allow for kind of experiment, open ended experiments to happen and emergent things occur. So a lot of the pretense of contemporary art, whether one likes it or not, is about allowing for that kind of emergence to happen. And I'd argue that that happens in these technical domains too. And that's when it's interesting, right? It's less interesting. A protocol in and of itself allows for that emergence to happen, which makes it different from, let's say, a bounded algorithmic interaction where, where I say you do this and then when you do this X happens. That is a less interesting.
- [15:19]
C
What's a good example of the phenomenon you're describing?
- [15:22]
A
Well, ok, so for example, the work we're showing from Ken Stanley, he's a computer scientist at the University of Florida, this is 2003, came up with this thing called the NEAT algorithm. And the NEAT algorithm is a genetic mutation system. So basically you have a shader or some pixels, you present humans with eight images. And the only point of the game is that they click on what interests them. So you click on this image and then it will spawn eight new images. Then you click on this image and it will spawn eight new images. And what you found over the course of the pic reader experiment is that people just simply following what interests them very locally ultimately end up breeding forms that you would find in nature. And the work that we're showing there is he actually did this himself and he was trying desperately, very consciously to breed a face. So he's like, I'm clicking on this, I'm clicking on this, I want to get a face out of this. And in doing so he ended up generating a car. So we have the face and the car and the whole genesis of this, that bird in him and his collaborators kind of spawned a movement that is now a philosophical movement in machine learning research. There's labs at OpenAI who do this called open endedness, which is basically the basic premise that came from this original art experiment was it turns out that when you over optimize for something, you often limit or constrain the potential outcomes. And yet he wrote a book about this with a guy called Joel Lehman, who's actually at the program Oxford now called why Greatness can't be Planned. I really recommend it. It sounds like a self help book. It kind of is in a way, but it's like very good. And the basic idea is you go and look at all these accounts of great humans who've accomplished great things and you say scientists, artists, whatever. And then when you ask them directly how did you have this idea? They all say, I have no idea. I just kind of, you know, did this and then that looked interesting and then did this. And so it turns out that by over constraining both in the sciences and with machine learning and in the arts, you kind of narrow the potential emergent fields like emergent outcomes that can happen. And I think personally, with all the kind of bellyaching about AI being bad for art and so on and so forth, looking at Stanley and the open endedness kind of thinkers is pretty instructive because to me it sounds like the reason art institutions exist. There's actually a real kind of, there's a real complementary goal there, which is to say you need spaces to allow for people to experiment openly and not have a preordained outcome. Like for example, a marble picture of someone beautiful just to leave the knife in a little bit. You need for that to happen. Because even though 99 out of 100 of the experiments might turn out not achieving very much. The one that does tends to be incredibly transformative for everyone. And that's kind of the wonderful thing about having these open spaces for art.
- [18:21]
B
So to me, this is, well, remind me of Brian Eno being asked to write the music for the windows. Yeah, exactly, the windows opening. But that's ambient, Right. That's the idea that kind of art will always exist around us. Us. That's not really a protocol, is it? That's more the idea that these are just always, you know, the art has kind of moved outside of the gallery.
- [18:49]
A
Yeah.
- [18:49]
B
Is that is.
- [18:50]
A
Would you.
- [18:50]
B
Would you just regard this as sort of the extension that this is now just you are actively interacting with?
- [18:56]
A
I think there's compliments to, you know, in a sense, it's funny, one would assume I'm more kind of. I'm more kind of informed about Eno than I am. I'm totally the archetype who would be obsessed with Brian Eno. I've met him a few times. He's really lovely, but I'm actually not. I mean, I really like Roxy Music, but he had a game that he would play that's kind of like the I chink.
- [19:16]
B
The one with the cards.
- [19:17]
A
Yeah, there's a really famous name for it. But, you know, that would be closer to a protocol work in the sense. But what's different, I think with that is that, you know, that's closer, I'd say in a way to, let's say the Fluxus movement. There were many people playing with funny games to try and bring you out of routine. Or funny games to try and explore freedom. Like silly, you know, Yoko Ono used to do well.
- [19:41]
B
Or Ulipo. Right?
- [19:42]
A
Yeah, exactly. Ulipo.
- [19:42]
B
Exactly.
- [19:44]
C
Bought Ulipo.
- [19:47]
A
Ulipo. It's kind of like a similar type chance operation thing, but with writing. So it was like a literature.
- [19:53]
B
So you put like constraints. So like you have to write a book without using the letter E. I see, I see.
- [19:57]
A
And the thing is. So there are commonalities in place, but I think with protocols. The difference here is that it's kind of low level programming of emergent systems. And so in my mind, that works as well with software as it does in the biological context. But they share a spirit. It's more closely related to Ulipo or systems art or cybernetics work than it would be to impressionist paint.
- [20:22]
C
How does football fit into the broader Dryhurst intellectual universe?
- [20:28]
A
It's a great passion. I'm a big Aston Villa fan and Villa play in the Europa League final tomorrow. And so one of my great frustrations is that with very rare exceptions, there are some people in the arts, but with rare exceptions, I can't merge these two worlds together with many people because I have very passionate thoughts about football and have very passionate thoughts about culture and the arts more broadly. But, you know, two very, very different audiences. Yeah, but I was thinking about writing something. I haven't quite come up with a coinage yet to properly encapsulate it, but I'm not all that excited about the Europa League final tomorrow. And I think it relates in a way to what I was saying about the arts, where. Okay, so for context, for normal people who don't care about this stuff, Aston Villa are in the first European final in my lifetime. The last time they were in a European final was in 1982 when they beat Bayern Munich to win the Champions League. Which, as far as I remember, Arsenal still haven't done, at least for a couple of weeks.
- [21:26]
C
At time of recording.
- [21:28]
A
At time of recording. Yeah. Yeah, I really Fancy you against PSG Francis.
- [21:33]
C
1 nil by Munich, 1982.
- [21:38]
A
It wasn't Trev Francis, it was Peter Witty. Trevor Francis was play for Birmingham City. But, yes, that was good. So. But the basic idea is I'm not excited about it. And I was like, well, why am I not excited about this one? Because I think that football, like other things, like the arts, like the media, is a domain in which we still talk about it like it means the same thing as it did in the 20th century. For example, Villa are in the Europa League final. They're playing Freiburg, who've never reached European final before in their life. They're kind of a small team from Germany. Villa have gotten to that final without ever getting into second gear, because the resource asymmetry between the Premier League and the European teams is so stark now that last year the final of the Europa League was contested between Man United and Tottenham, who are both relegation threatened. This year, had Villa not beaten them, Nottingham Forest probably was have won it, who are relegation threatened. So you've got to the point whereby, with the exception of superteams, the worst teams in the Premier League are competitive with the best of the rest in Europe. That, to me, doesn't feel particularly competitive.
- [22:46]
B
Right.
- [22:46]
A
And it doesn't feel like the accomplishment of winning that trophy is anywhere near analogous to when these competitions were more competitive. I would say the same thing. For example, in the arts, right? We talk about the arts as if it's the same as when we had this kind of shelling point, consensus culture of the, you know, the mid century to late 20th century, when releasing a record really mattered to everyone. And people would discuss the Michael Jackson record around the cool water cooler or whatever the kind of romantic idea is, and it just doesn't mean the same thing. Or, I mean, you know, in our world, you know, like prestige media doesn't mean the same thing. Right. And now I'm very entangled with prestige media. It's not in my interest to talk about it.
- [23:30]
C
But you're on it right now.
- [23:33]
A
Absolutely. But the thing is, it's an interesting example where, like, we talk about things like the 20th century, even though we're in the 21st century and nobody has an incentive to tell the truth about it. Right? So in the case of the football, the football team wants to sell the commemorative shirts for the biggest victory and, you know, the new European triumph and the competition themselves and Sky Sports or whoever, they need to drum up interest in this. The players want to believe that what they're accomplishing is the same as what happened in the 80s. Everyone is motivated to kind of pretend like it's the same when it's not the same, because the underlying rules and the economics of it just change so severely. And you could say the same in the arts, right, or in media more broadly, is that everyone's. So many costs. We've invested so much into this world. It's how we define ourselves. But we know that the prestigious publication or the feature that you write or whatever will not make a mark, will not make anywhere near a mark the same kind of mark as it would have done in 1992, and will be surpassed by a teenager paying clippers to, you know, to trigger someone on YouTube and own them or whatever it might mean. Right? So this is the point of frustration, is that we're kind of in this interstitial period where we still talk about these things as if they're the same. They sometimes look the same, they have a lot of the same features, but it's not the same anymore, Right? And so I think part of the protocol analysis is trying to unpack that and be like, okay, well, if it looks the same, it smells the same, we're all investing, or some of us are investing faith in this thing. What's different about it? The different thing is kind of invisible. You can only infer it through looking at the underlying. Through looking at the underlying rules and looking at the broader context of it. You can only infer the difference from doing that because the song still sounds Like a song. The picture in the magazine still looks like a picture in magazine, the article in the magazine still looks like an article in the magazine, but it doesn't have the same cultural weight as it once did. Not saying that's necessarily a good thing, but we don't, I don't think we to tend tell like a. We're not telling an honest story about the state of the world or indeed our kind of like degrees of freedom to be able to remedy that if we're not happy about it unless we discuss these things. Yeah. So, you know, I think once you start looking at things from a protocolistic perspective, you see it everywhere.
- [25:54]
C
Well, tell us, where else do you see it?
- [25:57]
A
God, let's think. I mean, my explicit focus is on machine learning systems and the Internet and the attention economy. Right. So I think that like, for me, the basic provocation was to say we've been reading culture wrong in the past 15, 20 years. That if you would look back over the last 15, 20 years as a series of sequential images or tweets or books or whatever, you'd be missing the picture of, of 21st century media and culture. That actually in 10, 20 years time you'd look back and say, oh no, well, this was the deployment of Instagram, this was the deployment of the infinite feed, that these would be the consequential gestures that were created that make sense of the world around us. Right. And I think that there's a whole. I mean, there is precedent for this, but there's an underexplored kind of aesthetic thing theory around that, like what it feels like to be in different environments. Right. Like what it feels like to interact with media in a certain way. And I think that, that, you know, that to me is much more interesting than what is placed within the squares.
- [27:07]
B
And this, I suppose, is what you say that protocols are the thing that exists above just the kind of what is produced on the platform. That is the platform is more interesting than anything that is on it itself. And that is that a good, fair enough summation of protocol?
- [27:26]
A
Yeah, which, you know, and McLuhan would say medium is the message. There's precedent for this too. I think that the. Yeah, I think it takes on. It takes on its own valence and becomes a lot more kind of explainable in the context of AI, actually, because you have this kind of crisis where when confronted, like one of the natural properties of AI models is they can produce near infinite stuff. And so people are like, well, what does an image mean? And you're like, well, from A certain perspective, this is a bit of a crisis. Right. You can produce a gajillion images on the same seed or whatever. Right. But from another perspective, which I think is very common in a contemporary art tradition, it's not a problem at all because all you do is you're asked to move up one layer of abstraction. Like, now you as someone who can create something, can create infinite images. Right. Now, you as someone. And there's no. There's gonna be no shortage of interesting, creative artistic ideas you can have now that you understand that you wield that power. But that's the area to focus on.
- [28:22]
C
So what does that mean for the Anglo futurism, AI art?
- [28:25]
A
I mean, I just go back and push back on the whole sculpture thing.
- [28:30]
C
Yeah.
- [28:30]
A
And say, well, you know, I mean, I don't know, we'll probably get into my impression from afar. I had some dealings with the UK or whatever, is that the country's in a little bit of a bind. Particularly, you know, there's a new kind of economic agenda appearing, and then there's a bind there, and there's a lot of kind of frayed and incumbent institutions that have their own feelings about that, and it's going to be messy. And somewhere in that needs to be people who look at the cards on this table and say, okay, well, what's the country's role in that? And, you know, and I think that defaulting back to. I don't know, we can't keep treating Europe like a museum. Like, maybe that is the economy. Like, maybe that is the economy of the future, is like, you go, like, look at the palace and, you know, and, you know, invest in the brick or whatever. Like, maybe that. But I don't think that that's the vision. Like, I don't think. Yeah.
- [29:24]
C
So how could we create an Angular futures protocol for. For Britain?
- [29:29]
A
That's a big question. So this is where my imposter syndrome kicks in, because I have very strong opinions, for example, about arts education. I have very strong opinions about arts institutions and gaps that could be filled that I think could meet the moment. But more broadly, there's a lot to that.
- [29:50]
C
Well, if we look back at the classical statues, perhaps the protocols there was to inspire the views of those statues to the feats of greatness that the statue is supposed to embody.
- [30:01]
A
Sure, yeah.
- [30:03]
C
Like, presumably, in your vision of a protocol that is something you can achieve, you can instantiate the virtues that you want to see in a society through the creation of art that speaks to the impulses beneath it.
- [30:13]
A
I Think there's some truth to that in the sense that. So, for example, one thing I'm particularly animated about is I don't know if you've been playing with Codex or Core Code or.
- [30:21]
B
I spend my entire life in front of a Claude.
- [30:24]
A
It's an archetype and yeah, hasn't really
- [30:27]
C
reached journalistic offices yet.
- [30:29]
A
It will, to the extent whereby I'm increasingly convinced it's a new form of social media. I think it's that big because people are like, oh, it's this nerdy thing that people are doing on the side. I'm like, no, no. The way people engage with this, to me reminds me. I was in San Francisco when Twitter happened. And I'm like, it's the same archetype of nerds, basically. And the same. I'm like, I'm thinking different. That happened with Twitter. I remember literally being like, I'm on Facebook, I'll post something, whatever, and then got onto Twitter and I'm like, whoa, this is. Whoa, this is like penetrating. And I'm talking. Yeah, this is the hard mind. I'm talking to you and I'm talking to this invisible audience at the same time. And, oh, this is uncomfortable and strange. And I feel like that with this agentic automated software kind of universe is. I'm like, this has all the hallmarks of that for me. And it isn't media in the traditional sense, but when you talk about, like, aspirations, you know, if you could say, as I do somewhat provocatively, that software is the language of our time, it's a literature of our time. But most people, most people don't speak that language. And we are rapidly moving towards a world where people do speak that language. And if you look at the Levins of the world, he's like, we're going to be talking to our livers. And he is saying that with credibility, right? So I'm like, okay. So everyone comes on board and is able now to enact things they want to see in the world that are of course constrained to the realm of software, which penetrates quite deep in our world right now, right? That to me, the philosophical challenge and also the kind of the aspirational and quite questions that are raised by that capability is a challenge worth meeting. And that is maybe equivalent to the old kind of. These old kind of propagandistic kind of statues or whatnot of the time. That we're trying to inspire a sense of nationalism or something like that feels antiquated to me. The new challenges were, what do you do with that? New capability and how do you do it in a consensual way? Right. Like how do you structure society when that capability is available? What opportunities are there? That's interesting to me.
- [32:42]
B
I've got two questions. One is that I want to push back slightly because you seem to have said both that things on Twitter don't matter. It's people shouting into the void. But simultaneously, you know, software is the language of our time and can be massively powerful in what it enables and makes possible.
- [33:03]
A
Let me reconcile that for you.
- [33:04]
B
Yeah, do that one first.
- [33:08]
A
No, no, no, I think you reconcile that by, by, by my basic, like, provocation, which is to say that Twitter itself was incredibly transformative and changed the way we thought. And there are perverse incentives and all kind of sub routines and sub narratives within Twitter that, you know, that are masked by the content. Right. So we could have an argument about, you know, a bunch of people who are really mad about a particular issue. And I could say, well, in that particular instance, if you were to read all those tweets, you would be misled as to what's actually going on. Like, what's actually going on is there's a status game going on here.
- [33:46]
B
Yeah, yeah, okay.
- [33:47]
A
Right, so. So Twitter is incredibly consequential. Right. But if you were to just follow it like a 20th century media interaction, you'd probably be missing the bigger picture. That's my argument.
- [33:58]
B
Yeah.
- [33:58]
C
Okay.
- [33:59]
B
Okay, I follow you.
- [33:59]
C
Okay.
- [34:00]
B
And then, and then the other one that I want to ask is, because I think it's a, it's an idea that is kind of common in slightly sort of utopian minded people, is that if we empower people and give them the tools that they need, they will be able to unleash this sort of vast amount of creativity. And I found myself thinking, you know, you see it during COVID to me is the classic one. But. But actually the LLM to me is the culmination of, you know, liberals saying we just need to teach people to read. And then we just need to teach people to give them libraries, to give them access to the books.
- [34:36]
A
They're doing, like liberal subject.
- [34:38]
C
Exactly.
- [34:38]
B
And then we need to. Then Wikipedia makes it free for everyone. And now we have the LLM that you can literally, you know, do everything right. You can. You only have to express it in natural language. And yet the opening up of these tools to people, I feel, has not necessarily preserved, produced the vast unshackling of human capability, the vast flourishing. And, and I sort of wonder whether
- [35:06]
C
the,
- [35:08]
B
you know, with these kind of with these, you know, protocols, whether actually people need a sort of constraint. They need actually very tight rules that allow them to work in a sort of sphere because openness is too frightening.
- [35:24]
A
I think you're right. I'd actually agree with that. I mean, I used to make this kind of claim online where, you know, name me the great Internet album. Right. Because the whole. One of the promises of Web2 is we're completely unshackled. Everyone can now be their own independent publisher or whatever. And like, where's the great record? I mean, like, there's very few. I mean, I can think of really cool things that happened.
- [35:44]
B
Yeah.
- [35:44]
C
Like someone see the Internet on a screen in TV and film.
- [35:49]
A
Yep.
- [35:50]
C
I mean, people spend about night at their waking hours looking at the screen. And that's never the substance of exactly.
- [35:56]
A
Like where is the. So there's the narrative kind of overshot the usage. And I would agree with you. And I think that, you know, I mean, I mean, in an ideal world, I think you'd have both. Right. I don't think you should be arbitrarily limiting people's access to the tools of the day. But there is a naivety, I think. I mean, I've said this before. If you look at like the Zuckerbergs of the world of the kind of Web two kind of universe, they have this very naive, optimistic view where they're like, if we just give everyone the tools, you know, YouTube will be the great library. And I'm like, yeah, but the part you're missing here is that that's what you would do with YouTube. Right? That there's. There's small groups of very well educated people who see this as like a cornucopia. And for every one person for whom is a cornucopia, there's like maybe a hundred thousand people for whom this. Because it is a trap. I mean, like, you know, where it's. Where there's no source of truth and, and there's no institutions to guide them. And the guy selling the supplements is telling you that. And so I do think it kind of has to be both. For every measure of freedom that you offer to people, you also have to be. You have a duty of care to not necessarily be a nanny state. Not in this room. But I was talking actually the artist who Paglen is a good friend of mine. He's worked a lot on psychological operations and the history of psyops and so forth to a very serious degree. And you're looking at the latest bleeding edge technology where they're finding that you can reconstruct images from the human brain when you're dreaming that are just as vivid as when you're awake. And they're like, oh, that's funny, because that means if I point this at you, I can make an image happen for you. Right. And you're like, okay, that capability may be in its infancy. We should prepare for that existing. Okay, do we need, like a, you know, a department of cognitive security?
- [37:51]
B
The tinfoil hats start looking less silly?
- [37:53]
A
Well, yeah, but I mean, have our structures and institutions scaled with the challenge of the time? I would say probably not. And that, you know. Yeah. So I'm not a naive utopian in that sense where I think, give everyone these LLMs and we're going to, you know, emergency. Have a paradigm.
- [38:12]
B
I raise this more as a question to how a protocol creates emergence and how it can create one sort of wonder again versus, you know what I think often about how human desires are base and pretty constant in that, you know, it's sex. It's the red of the McDonald's arches. Like, how do you. How. Because you can be descriptive, right? You can have art that sort of just looks at it and says, right, yeah, people want sex, sure. But to me, that seems somewhat falling
- [38:52]
A
short and with the constraints. Because. Because I think the other thing worth critiquing or keeping in mind is also that that even though, for example, a YouTube or a Twitter has this kind of greater libertarian thrust of, like, the people will decide, there are constraints baked into that that are useful, Right. The attention economy has a very simple kind of coda, which is to say the thing that the most people like or the most bots like or the most is the best thing that deserves and warrants more stuff. It's funny, I've noticed recently, I've seen some articles talking about YouTube revising this because characters like a MrBeast or whatever basically just gamed it to such an extent that they're like, we have to start rethinking this because it never worked. But that was a protocol that was put in place, and that's a very. That is a very strict constraint. Right, as you're saying. Okay, well, on the surface of things, the bigger kind of argument is everyone's free to express themselves and we'll have this kind of abundance of different expression, and it's like it turns into, you know, attention hacking.
- [39:54]
C
Not to kind of torpedo your career as an artist, but there are normative undertones to what you're saying, Matt. And if there are normative Undertones. Then I wonder what you think we should be putting at the center. You know, what are the moral considerations or the values that should be at the center of the protocols that define our lives?
- [40:14]
A
Well, I mean, I can speak with some. With some sophistication on that in the realm of the arts, but in terms of, like, greater. Greater moral life. I mean, that's.
- [40:23]
C
Sure, but you need a big. I mean, I speak to you.
- [40:26]
B
I know.
- [40:26]
C
I. I know that you're a man who knows what he doesn't like.
- [40:28]
A
Sure.
- [40:29]
C
When he. When he looks at social media, for instance.
- [40:32]
A
Yeah. Okay. I think that. Okay. If we follow this kind of institute of cognitive security a bit further. I don't know. You know, I mean, I do think that there is a certain point. Okay. Case in point. My wife and I went to Oman about 10 years ago, and Oman's a really interesting country. It has a really interesting genesis. Sultan Qaboos was a very interesting leader, clearly, you know, obviously an authoritarian leader. I mean, but one thing he did was he made all advertising illegal in the country outside of certain areas. And I have to say, it's really nice. Nobody was, but you were walking through,
- [41:09]
C
trying to hijack your attention, the whole.
- [41:10]
A
And you're walking through the street, and I was like, what's different? I feel somehow so calm. And it was that. And he did all kinds of interesting things. He had a style sheet for the city, which. Which you probably like. With the marble.
- [41:22]
C
No, I love that kind of thing.
- [41:24]
B
Oman is extraordinary if you get.
- [41:26]
A
You look, it's an unbelievable country. And again, so in that circumstance, I do have to say that on the one hand, you do have a world where, you know, you want free markets and so on, so forth, and you want people to be able to express themselves and not to have to write everything through the Department of Moral Standards or whatever. Like, that sounds like hell.
- [41:45]
C
Yeah.
- [41:45]
A
It was really nice to not have your attention hijacked. I used to have a friend like this in Germany who, being very German and blunt, would just be like, I don't want to think about sex all day. There is a hack, you say, with the McDonald's or, you know, the lingerie ad or whatever. And he would be quite upfront about this. He is like, I don't want to. Every time I'm walking, every three seconds, it's an involuntary interaction.
- [42:07]
C
There's an involuntary, mild form of sensual assault, I suppose.
- [42:12]
A
But I mean, I think that, you know, these are severe. And ultimately, I am like a democracy person. So I do think these are things that should be debated widely. However, I do think there's something to be said for the first fact that if the attention economy was a bit of a preamble to much more capable information systems that will know everything about you. And then I do think there's a lot that has to be said about what permissions and what protocols. Keep repeating myself. Those systems operate under. Because you've seen even. Even from very simple systems like Twitter, the back end of it is not simple at all, but the main interaction is actually quite simple in contrast to where we're going. And you've already seen how a lot of people's brains have been hijacked by that. And I think that there's something to be said about having governmental agencies and so on who are informed enough to be able to have proper debates. And it's weird that you don't really see the this in political debate writ large.
- [43:21]
B
Mads, it seems to me that you are potentially even more of a reactionary than Tomanut here. You know, this is a pretty strong position for you to be holding because, I mean, it's one that I definitely sympathize with.
- [43:35]
C
Ban ads, lay down a civilizational aesthetic.
- [43:38]
A
No, I mean, I do have to say it's quite nice in a small place like Oman, but no, I wouldn't propose a civilizational aesthetic. No, I mean, I think my position is far from reactionary. I mean, I'm an institutionalist. I like the principles of contemporary art. I like new degrees of emergent freedom. I don't like copyright.
- [43:59]
C
He's a reaction read.
- [44:00]
A
Sorry. Yeah, I know.
- [44:00]
B
I was just like, this is the trash.
- [44:05]
A
Who's paying you?
- [44:08]
B
Just talking into my living and you'll be cut from the art world.
- [44:12]
A
I mean, is what it is. But, like. Yeah, no, no, I mean. I mean, my principles are actually like, fairly common, you know, fairly common kind of liberal progressive principles where I want my institutions to be responsive to the time so that you can get an informed citizenry, so that the citizenry can actually form, you know, proper. I mean, like this program at Oxford that. That I've joined, you know that there's been a lot of discussion about deliberative democracy, like, ways in which we can use these tools to actually augment democracy. That would be a position I favor. Right. I mean, I think that, for example, one use of LLMs. No one should ever be fooled by terms and conditions ever again. Right? Because you can now. There's no excuse for you to not have that information put to you in the most Digestible form possible potentially put to your agents, so your age agent just approves it on your behalf anyway. But when you think about the sheer amount of complexity when you're talking about democratic issues, we're not really getting that complexity from the citizen. And I think that there's a lot of work that can be done
- [45:19]
C
from
- [45:19]
A
people who are fully aware of the capabilities of these tools to think about what that looks like. What does it mean for them to have more choice? What does it mean for them to be able to assert their preferences in a greater way than they do currently?
- [45:34]
B
This seems relevant to the call that you exhibited at the Serpent Tub. Maybe. Do you want to explain what that show was and then what you were kind of trying to do with it?
- [45:46]
A
Yes. So Holly and I, when we first started training models, around 2016 or so, we also started acquire. And part of the idea was not, number one, we wanted to create our own training data for the models because that just seemed like an interesting thing to do. But number two, the choir was interesting because you could generate a perfect piece of media that sounds like a choir and miss the whole point of why choirs exist. So choirs are something you participate in. You feel a sense of emergent unison with a bunch of people. They're one of the most popular pastimes in the world and always have been. Right. So it felt like, kind of interesting to start and attack the problem of AI looking at these group singing rituals, because it just seemed relevant. So over time, we trained tons of models with large groups of people singing, thousands of people at a time in some cases. And then for the call, we thought to do an exhibition around that, where the whole idea was to basically go on a kind of ethnographic folk tour of the UK and invite a bunch of different choirs, some professional, some amateur or just hobbyists, to train a model together. And the basic understanding from our perspective is models as we understand them are these monumental collective accomplishments at the time. Particularly there's this kind of very overwrought interpretation of LLMs or large diffusion models as being these predatory extreme. And I'm like, no, these are kind of like crazy accomplishments. I mean, these are, you know, this is like everyone together, available to everyone. It's the responsibility, it's the byproduct of everyone and no one in particular. This, even from a perspective act, this is kind of like a progressives, a progressive's wet dream, in a sense. I mean, general intellects and so on, right? So you're like, it's interesting to kind of show that to people where you say, okay, we can do this in a consenting way, because I quite like having contenting relationships with people. I'm not going to just record your voice and then go and do something over here with it. Yeah. And so we basically train models with large groups of people and they all seem quite content with it. And the models end up sounding beautiful and bespoke because they're the product of real things that happen between people.
- [48:03]
B
This kind of relates to me to the call from Tyler Cowan and Patrick Collison for these new aesthetics. Right. Is that they, you know, these are two, you know, probably two of the biggest names in progress. Studies.
- [48:21]
A
Yeah. Clever people. Sure.
- [48:22]
B
Who are taking a sort of engineering approach to artistic form. Right. In that if you could just know. You get a sort of Johnny Ives kind of figure in and he can work out that this. This sort of century, we're all going to do this.
- [48:42]
A
This. Yeah.
- [48:43]
B
Then maybe everyone could feel kind of like history has restarted again. But that, I suppose you would say, is an example of that old style that everyone is. Everyone would be motivated to believe that art could work that way. Is that. Is that a fair.
- [48:59]
C
Sort of.
- [49:00]
A
So in fairness to them, I think there's two things going on. Number one, the idea of wealthy patrons instrumentalizing and basically catalyzing a very specific art movement has a great history. Right. The Medicis are discussed as great patrons of the arts, but the arts to them was very instrumental from the beginning. They were a less prestigious family. They were looking for an angle, basically. And their angle was to browbeat people with. With their taste. Right. I mean, like the Rockefellers and the robber barons who said that the MoMA and the great institutions in the States were. You know, there's all kinds of articles about them being philistines because they weren't cultured people in that sense. They saw value in culture. They looked at the French museums and they said, huh, this is a way for us to bring something to the public. As they did. But also, this is a soft power move. So art's always been instrumental in this way. And so I wouldn't disagree that someone, Cowan and Collison, could very well, through investing enough money and setting an agenda, could very well spark something. It might look like, what if the Greeks had midjourney? Which tends to be. It was just like, okay, cool. So I'm not disqualifying that things can emerge like that, particularly when you pour a lot of resources into it. My only contestation was saying that they were in the rfp, they were referencing Bauhaus. And they referenced Bauhaus as if it was just an aesthetic. They were like, the Bauhaus aesthetic was influential. And I'm like, well, you really need to look at the history of how the Bauhaus came about. The Bauhaus was basically a pedagogical, you know, a pedagogical kind of movement and many different kind of aesthetics actually emerged from that. That when we look back expose facto, some of those had commonalities and some of those kind of congealed into what we now understand to be Bauhaus, if you type it into Google. But in my mind, if they are trying to kind of inspire or create any comparisons in the Bauhaus, they would be approaching it wrong by putting out a proposal and saying, what's your vision for how buildings should look in the future? I don't think that's how it works. It works through creating conditions to a life or emergence task happen. Right. And that's harder. That is also, I would argue, you know, the difference in maybe the VC kind of ROI approach towards culture more broadly is you can, you can get results. Absolutely. Like you can say, take the Y combinator approach or something like this. We're going to pump this money in, you know, but I don't know whether the, you know, I think ultimately that the outcomes of that are potentially more constrained than they need to be. And that's not the real opportunity. Like, the opportunity would be to say, okay, if you're interested in new approaches towards aesthetics or new ways of thinking about the modern world, like, why not establish an institution that allowed for things to emerge as opposed to people posting weird kind of combinatorial proposals on Twitter. I've seen a bunch of them where it's like the Greeks have mid journey and what if the our deco was
- [52:03]
B
green kind of thing?
- [52:04]
A
Yeah. And it's like, that's cool. But there could be a lot of back padding going on there about what it means. But maybe that doesn't matter. I mean, I mean. Right. Like, I personally think it's a bit banal and boring, but you know, I
- [52:17]
C
mean, you're more of an elitist, aren't you?
- [52:20]
A
Yeah, in that sense, yeah.
- [52:21]
C
Tell us about your elitism.
- [52:23]
B
There's a great hospital pass though.
- [52:29]
A
Okay. So, I mean, I think elitism gets a bit of a bad rap. And I don't know if we're talking about the same kind of elitism. There was a great book a number of years ago by a writer who's based here called Elian Gleiser. Who wrote a book called Elitism A Progressive Defense.
- [52:44]
B
I thought it was really excellent, your two interests. Sure.
- [52:49]
A
Well, if you go back, I mean, I'm an imposter talking about British politics, but I remember it being an issue in the 90s where people would talk about the elitist position was the progressive position, which is to say you need Channel four, you need strong institutions, you need the Tate Modern to be an area where you can incubate these talents, but that has a curatorial process, that has accountability, that has so on. But the point of the institution is not to ask everybody in the public what they want to see. Right. Whereas the Conservative Tory position at the time was to give vouchers, say, oh, why are we funding this stuff? We'll just give everyone a voucher and then they can vote with their feet. Right. They can go and spend it at the opera or spend it or whatever. So these things have kind of inverted over time where now it's considered elitist and kind of, you know, anti progressive to insist on a higher standard for. Of rigor, let's say, in a cultural institution. And I don't think that that's true at all. So my elitism is more to say that you have a great tradition in this country and with arts institutions that says that allows for experimental, open ended things to happen and emerge in space that not everybody gets immediately and that you reap the rewards for that over time. That the immediate value of that is not an immediate payoff, as you might get with the ice cream museum or a museum that's trying to hit numbers, to be like, we want everyone to come in here and take a picture of this big crazy thing. You know, that to me is philistine. Right. It's populist in a way that I think is debased. Right. So elitism in my corner is saying, no, actually you need to allow for things to breathe. And you need to allow, for example, for artists to express themselves in ways that aren't immediately legible.
- [54:34]
C
Do you think you've been good at this over the years?
- [54:37]
A
Who's been good in general?
- [54:38]
C
No, no. Who's been good at creating art where society has benefited from? Thinking about it for a few years.
- [54:49]
A
Can't put me on spot there. Who has been good at doing it?
- [54:53]
C
I mean, maybe Banksy is like a kind of counterexample.
- [54:56]
A
Well, yeah, Banksy is definitely, definitely a bit of a crowd pleaser. I mean, it's not my world. I don't know that much about Banksy, to be honest. Other than the, you know, girl holding the rose or whatever.
- [55:07]
B
Great question.
- [55:07]
A
Who has been good at doing that
- [55:11]
B
when you're exhibiting Venkatesh Rao. Right. And his essays, I always find were sort of difficult, but, you know, really rewarded.
- [55:19]
A
That's true. But I would be. I would be avoiding the question if I said Venkatesh. I think he's a. I think he's a great writer and is very generative in his own way, but I think I'd be avoiding the question.
- [55:27]
C
Although, you know, people who permanent a pop culture like Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin.
- [55:33]
A
Yeah. Not my thing. Not my thing.
- [55:37]
B
Like Jody.
- [55:39]
A
Jody. Great. But a different world, not my time. I mean. Okay, here's a concession I'll make. No one is immediately coming to mind. I think that, for example, when I look to the programming of Channel 4 or the kind of experimental programming of the BBC from a time when I was kind of growing up, and I think back to the quality of documentary or strange comedy or, you know, the fact that you could get artists making strange television programs, which at the time obviously meant more than it does in the present day. I think that that will be a. I can sometimes see some of that work and be shocked by how good it is. Like, it's almost. It's almost kind of like upsetting how good it is. You're like, I can't believe that at a time when this was the most coveted airtime, right. That there were institutions that were there to take a punt on that.
- [56:32]
C
Right.
- [56:32]
A
You look at someone like a Chris Morris, you know, who. I think a lot of the shows that he was making for radio and television were unbelievable and eccentric and strange.
- [56:42]
C
Brosai, amazing.
- [56:44]
B
Jam, even weirder.
- [56:46]
A
But it's unthinkable. It's kind of unthinkable to imagine that happening in the present day. And that's a great shame. And so that's an example of. I look at Morris and say it's important that there was somebody able to kind of take those chances at the time. And there was clearly a supportive institutional backing and ideology to want to put forward work like that. And the influence of it is incredibly apparent. Right. I mean, like. I mean, you look at someone like Nathan Fielder, who I think is like one of the few crazy, redeeming people on television now in terms of, like, the work he does, which I think is unbelievable. We actually tried to have him in the show and it almost worked out.
- [57:25]
C
Really.
- [57:25]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because he's a pro club. I mean, his whole thing is about rules. It's comedy about rules. It's basically like he's inferring the social cues between people and then playing with them. It's really art. I think it's unbelievable. So, yeah, so I'm put on the spot because it's funny. I'm so used to not thinking about artists in the traditional sense. Genuinely. I don't spend much time thinking about that because I'm involved in this other stuff. So I'm like, what are artists I like.
- [57:51]
C
I don't know.
- [57:52]
A
Maybe. Maybe that's a crisis.
- [57:55]
C
Too much time thinking about football statistics.
- [57:59]
B
That is true.
- [58:00]
A
I do make the joke that, yeah, like. Or what people appreciate when they haven't discovered sports yet. It's like you have to be really elevated to appreciate the beauty of football. I think that's the. Yeah.
- [58:14]
B
It's ironic, right, that as you say, these were the most coveted time. Coveted films. Times. And yet now with these channels being far less, you know, sought after, they are. They put out a lower quality of programming.
- [58:32]
A
Yeah. I mean, and again, maybe they are doing some stuff. It's just. It's so far, it's so peripheral that I wouldn't even be able to tell you. Do you know what I mean? That's the upsetting thing is I would assume that if something wild was happening, I would have heard tell of it, you know, and I don't hear that. And it's also partly, I also genuinely think this, that that, like, the equivalent freak in the present day likely wouldn't be thinking about making a television show. Yeah, I don't think that. You know, and I mean, there's the classic line of like, you know, Bowie, like, was being interviewed about the Internet and he was saying, yeah, you know, if I was 20 now, I'd be programming on the Internet. Like, of course I would be. And I'm like, I think there's some truth to that. I think that you. You know, I don't think that the creativity or, you know, or I don't think that art as an industrial category has a monopoly on inspiration or ideas or, you know, being real. I just don't think that at all. I think there's weird periods of time where those two things intersect.
- [59:37]
B
Yes. The sort of period of gallery culture was unique in what it produced with respect to art. There's been a lot of talk recently about Pink Panthers and the sort of sampling that she does. And that. That is kind of the, you know, in many ways is the sort of the technology or the style of the now. Right. Which is the sort of post modern. You take, take bits every from everywhere, mash them together and the sort of interesting thing comes out of the contrast. The as you say, that sort of higher plane that you've got a lot of things that are together and are existing in harmony and in contrast that is quite the Greeks with mid journey, isn't it like that? That is.
- [60:26]
A
I don't, I mean I don't know much about people have her so it wouldn't be a critique of her specifically but like that's a 50 year old development. Yeah, I mean I think in, in some ways I've seen this as well where like the, the latency between the way people discuss popular music and the things that are happening in the real world, like the actual kind of vanguard or unusual questions is worryingly large. You know, where you'll be like, oh yeah, it's club music. I'm like that's 50 years old. Like the people who pioneered club music when there was actually risk involved and it was a new, new thing to propose to people are like retiring there and it's still presented and I think
- [61:08]
B
part of it, Fat Boy Slim is still out and whatever. Well, I mean.
- [61:12]
A
And also if you were famous in the 90s, you're going to be the most famous person until you die. So they'll headline festivals until they drop. I hope that's a really long time away. But the point is that story, that particular industry keeps reselling its history, you know, because that's what they have. And of course there's always a new 19 year old, right? There's always a new 17 year old that's never been to a club, you know, so it's always fresh in a way. But in terms of like a bigger discussion about sampling being, you know, the most relevant.
- [61:44]
B
But that, but that's a protocol.
- [61:45]
A
Is anyone making that claim.
- [61:46]
B
But that's a protocol, right? Like in the, you know, dancing to music in this environment is a protocol and seemingly we might have hit on like a local minima for great use of that. Like encountering of loud music right in that like club music is a hyper stimulus. It, you know, hits you in a certain amount of. Right ways. It's actually quite hard to climb out of this like attractor state. That means that rather than any kind of realistic progress happening, we will just forever remain within these basins.
- [62:25]
A
That makes sense. Yeah. Because there's something kind of lindy to. Are you familiar with this term entrainment?
- [62:31]
B
I've heard the term.
- [62:32]
A
So basically humans are unique in the sense that we coordinate To a pulse.
- [62:36]
B
Yeah.
- [62:36]
A
And so there's a lot of, you know, when you talk about like evolutionary musicology and stuff, there's a lot of debates about this. But basically, you know, we coordinate to a pulse. It has all these functions. You could say that techno and kind of club music is a very targeted, reduced way of kind of activating that in us. And it's Lindy and it just keeps working. And you would say at this point now it's kind of a folk music. You know, it's been around long enough, it's matured, it's become. The habits and the rituals of it, I think are incredible. Particularly when actually in a space I have nothing. I mean, I would lose a lot of friends if I had something against club music. Right, but the. But it's more to just say that like that discussion of club music being the, you know, the vanguard state seems just like self.
- [63:27]
C
What are the rituals? Speaking of someone who's. Who steers clear of dance floors, what's going on there?
- [63:33]
A
I mean. Well, this. It's a great point. This is not my area of expertise, but I would say, isn't it all kind of frequent freeform? Yeah, it's freeform. There's a kind of like temporarily loss of individuality, I think, is like one of the great promises of it, where, particularly with the volume and the surroundings of people and the idea of it being dark, you can kind of become uninhibited in a certain way. There's also, of course, like a whole drug culture that goes along with it that is, you know, again, its own kind of folk culture at this point in time where people go to kind of enter into a different state and that, I mean, I'm no, you know, I'm no kind of expert on this, but that seems like that's also a pretty old thing that we do, you know. But somehow, I mean, club music in its best iteration. My friends in club music will laugh at me being the spokesperson for club music. But in its best iteration is interesting because you're all kind of looking at each other. There's not a stage, there's kind of a horizontalism to it. There's a loss, a temporary suspension of the idea of being individuated to each other. And that's very powerful. So in the most, I mean, not in the kind of new super festival scenario where you have like one person on stage pretending to do things, right? Like in the classic consideration, you wouldn't even see the dj, really, you know what I mean? It's all Just about being kind of in this, engrossed together. And I think it's very beautiful. I mean, you know, we've played clubs for many, many years and I love it. And I think there's something kind of very. There's something very, very enduring to it. But there's the separate side of that, which is it perpetually being presented as the future, which feels very melancholy and kind of stunted to me.
- [65:19]
B
Well, yeah, this is the thing that I'm interested in is I, you know, I totally accept that there is a long lag between the vanguard and the, you know, where the common culture is. But what seems sad to me is that, you know, I don't, I don't claim, you know, you are all in black, you know, a certain signifier that you must be cool whilst.
- [65:42]
A
Thank you very much.
- [65:44]
B
I only have black trousers on, so maybe I'm 50%. But to me, it would be sad that, like, I don't, you know, fine if people are still dancing in clubs and, you know, whatever, you go out on a Friday night and try and, you know, have a snog. But. But the idea that, you know. Yeah. That the vanguard are actually doing that as well, that to me seems the worrying thing if, you know, you're still going to clubs and club music is still there.
- [66:12]
A
I haven't gone to a club for years. No, I mean the break for me. And I think, again, I'm jaded in the sense that, like, I've been involved in that culture for a long time. I have a lot of deep friends in that culture. I love playing music festivals, I love doing, doing that. So there's also a certain point whereby when you've seen 100, you've seen all of them. It's a product of getting older too, where I don't desire it as much, but I have a great reverence for it. I think that the big shift for me, particularly on this protocol work and talking about what we might be wearing. The big shift for me was about 2015 or so on and I started meeting characters who were very nerdy, very interested in machine learning, different decentralized coordination protocols, so on, so forth, and be like, wow, what's remarkable about this subculture is it's not about how you look. It's got nothing. A lot of these characters you like, they would look like the most normal people on earth. And then when they open their mouth, I'm like, whoa, you are seeing the world differently to everybody else. And this is what I was promised, right. That's what I was promised by these art subcultures is that I would go there and encounter crazy ideas and not even like, not even like, you know, kind of. What's the word? Kind of provocative ideas for the hell of it. But just being like, whoa, like you, you are seeing things differently, you know what I mean? Like, you think prediction markets are an allied good and you are building and coordinating your life in accordance with that. And I would just walk past you on the street. Like, that is fascinating to me. Like, that's more interesting to me than, you know, the status signifiers or whatever. Which again, and I think it's a different time. Like in the 20th century, there was real risk involved. I mean, this is something that drives me crazy about the arts more broadly. It's like people just assumed that it was always this way. Like, I think that, you know, I'm a big fan of metal music and hardcore music and so on, so forth. It's like, I think the people who are pioneering this stuff in the 70s or 80s, like, there was real physical threat involved. Like, you know, I mean, these were weirdos. Like, this was not a lifestyle, this was not like a starter pack meme, you know what I mean? Like, these were strange. And you'll find that across every discipline of the arts, the. These were strange people, right? And it turns out that through their success and through their creativity over time it ends up becoming a simple lifestyle choice that, you know, every middle class child must pursue for at least two years, you know, whatever, like. But I think when we talk about the arts and so on, it's always important to clarify that. And I'm not submitting myself as a weird character who's breaking. But I'm saying that like, a lot of the characters that I have enjoyed my most encounter encountering fall into that category where I'm like, I don't know where to put you, but it's compelling. I'm like, I'm thinking. And that to me is more meaningful than kind of rehashing. Every. Literally, you can set your clock by every year there's an ambient revival, every year there's someone making a melancholy rave record about what it used to be. Like, do you know what I mean? And I'm like, this is. Once you've seen it three years in a row and I've seen it 20 years in a row, it wears off. I'm just not that interested in it.
- [69:23]
C
So if not this, then what are the artistic mediums of the future or those that excite you the most now?
- [69:31]
A
I mean, there is A weird niche of characters. I mean, there's a lot of spaces like we're very good friends. There's a space in Berlin called Trust that's been operating. There's a space. I'm spacing on the name right now because I'm tired. But there's a kind of game space that's opened in Berlin where it's all people just working on games as art. And a lot of them are networked games. So it's not like a standard kind of contained game there, but it's something you play with distributed networks of people and there's different kind of value exchange going on. There's weird pockets of people everywhere who all seem to be somewhat compelled by the power of networks and the kind of new conditions of networks. They tend to be a bit more software literate, tend to understand playing with attention as a medium is something. And then I guess in our corner, I'm very interested in physical space. So for me, most of the things we end up doing and up being. We don't get to do buildings just yet, but they end up being permanent big rooms that work differently to other rooms. So for example, the Read write training rooms we basically put forward as a kind of data center that you contribute to in real time. And it's a beautiful public space basically that works differently. And so for me, that's interesting.
- [71:00]
B
Yeah. And I think there are these new. These new spaces, I suppose will be. I wonder whether we will ever achieve that similar level of cultural ubiquity that as you said. Right. You don't. You are not. You would never now talk about a group of a visual style. You would talk about the technology maybe that empowered it and created it and made it possible in the same way of like the instrument Instagram algorithm versus any individual pictures.
- [71:28]
A
Yeah. Try taking the iPhone off people.
- [71:30]
B
Yeah.
- [71:31]
A
I mean, we have ubiquity and it's a pretty easy analogy.
- [71:34]
C
Right.
- [71:35]
A
Whether you like it or not, new iPhone drops. There's your consensus moment.
- [71:40]
B
Well, this is the Bauhaus thing, right? Is that the Bauhaus, that was what they recognized, that the nature of technology now and the fact that people were not making things. Things individually in their local environment meant that you were going to have to change the way that you built things
- [71:57]
A
and design things and nothing and function was considered a dirty word. It was considered corrupting. And then over time was assimilated.
- [72:03]
C
Yeah.
- [72:04]
A
And like. Yeah, but I mean, I think it's the same. You could see the same patterns with model releases now. Right. Like the. And this is quite clear. I mean, I always used to joke, like when we used to live in the Bay Area early Web two, people used to advertise for software engineers being like, we need a rock star. Because then the status was completely inverted. It was like, to be high status would be to be a rock star. And now it's completely flipped. Right? So like Andrej Karpathy or someone like this has the same. They're still shelling characters, but people are more interested in their thoughts and the software they're deploying in the world than they are in a record or a film. And that, you know, for better or worse, I wish there'd be more parity on that, but I think that's true. You know, so model drops, like if Claude drops Mythos tomorrow, there's your shelling moment. You would have it. It would be maybe equivalent to the Michael Jackson record.
- [72:58]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I suppose. You see this. I mean, you see the same thing, what in Post Malone's record, like Rockstar as well. Right. These old forms still retain their relevance despite the totally different changes in conditions.
- [73:15]
C
What do.
- [73:17]
B
I'm interested now. And you know, you talk about models here and you talk about these, like this choral music that you put into the model. And I think, you know, again, you talked a little bit earlier about the idea of people who make art as a living being sort of economically threatened by it. They make images, they're threatened by it. But that doesn't mean that necessarily art is under threat. There are two sort of schools of thought. I'd be interested to know where you've. May you locate yourself. Some people will say it's so important to be making things at the moment because you need to get yourself into the corpus. You. You have to be in the corpus because otherwise that is a form of immortality. And. And you will. And you will live forever through it. While others would say that, no, that is a sort of destruction of your individuality. And, you know, I mean, you seem to have. So you. You founded a company called Spawning AI, Right. That allows artists to opt out of being or anyone of being in training corpuses. Yeah. I mean, you seem to have taken a position there. How do you think about these things?
- [74:26]
A
My position, okay, so on the immortality front, I think that that's. It's somewhat true with the caveat being it's different. You know, anyone technically is on the Internet. What matters is whether you're discoverable. Right. So like, you know, we could post something to YouTube right now. And there's a whole logic as to whether that's ever found. I think LLMs may be arguably help find that. But the challenge also with LLMs is like if you have one image in the data set, I don't know if you're any more discoverable than you would be if you had zero images in the data set. Because that's not really how they work. They analyze patterns in images. But to take the point, we wrote a whole book and had a big media campaign in London called All Media as Training Data, encouraging people to be more open minded about the idea of contributing to a. A corpus greater than the sum of its parts. I advocate for that. I'm like a big fan of the public domain, for example. Yeah, the. What was the second part of the question?
- [75:27]
B
Well, just that. Well, I'm often accused of going so long that people first victim, multiple questions, it's over. But just that, you know, is it an immortality or, you know, you set up this company.
- [75:40]
A
Oh yeah. So spawning. Yeah. So the original idea for spawning, so we did this is back in like 2020. We've been interested in this consent question, but not from a kind of, you know, I genuinely think when it comes to training data and the matter of consent, I think we might have been the first people on earth to talk about it in like 2017. We were doing press releases about this, but not from a position of being like, you evil companies are gonna. It was more just being like, we have to be conscious of this. And we made a whole record about it, the release in 2019. And the basic idea there was like, actually it's kind of boring. It's really the most interesting thing you could do in this moment is start to train your own models and think consciously about what training data you're producing so as to produce the kind of child or you know. And this is borrowing from a writer called Hans Moravec who wrote a lot about this a long time ago, talking about taking responsibility for the cyborgs. Right. Like. And so in that realm our interest in consent was less kind of, we need to introduce new barriers to the training of models and more just being like where we're going actually having really detailed permissions that are more kind of detailed or rich than a simple yes, no is going to be important. And I bring up the example here. So the first experiment we did with spawning was we built this software protocol that allows for you to register a work and say yes or no to this work. And then the second part that we're developing is basically allowing for an agent to understand you and make decisions, like surrogate decisions on your behalf. So you could say, okay, I'm totally happy for my image to be used in this context, but I'm not cool with these five things occurring. The argument with spawning is that when you start from this very basic premise in a machine readable universe, now we're going to be able to have permissions that are incredibly bespoke for very little marginal cost. Something like copyright, which was designed for a very, very different media ecosystem, a very, very different time, I'd argue is somewhat, not even that relevant in this kind of paradigm, seems too much of a limitation. But that's not to say, okay, let's do away with everything because we're swiftly going to be in a situation where we're having a private conversation somewhere and you're going to want assurances that my agent that's listening and transcribing everything on my knowledge corpus isn't passing that over to this guy over here. Right. So permissions were given a bit of a dirty word because there's a lot given a bit of a dirty reputation because there are a lot of very like agony art types, copyright maximalists basically insisting on permissions in that kind of domain. And that was never our position. And so ultimately we ended up being unfashionable both with AI companies and that artist hoard. But I still maintain that's the most reasonable position to take, is that doing away with permissions is kind of silly. But there's all kind of new ideas we could have about how to structure those permissions in a way that people would appreciate.
- [78:53]
B
Thomas, my landlord, I'm sure terrified by the idea of there being even more ways that he could lord it over me in ever greater detail than ever.
- [79:03]
C
He gets Matrix. I get to lord it over him.
- [79:05]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [79:06]
B
Well, all the training data that I produce, you just think the other is this sucker to get sold to Tom's agent.
- [79:14]
A
We need your. We need your. When you're doing the dishes, you'll be selling it to a third party.
- [79:18]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [79:19]
A
Chinese companies. No, but I mean, I think this again is a crisis of imagination. And it speaks also to this idea of like treating everything like it's the 20th century. You see all the copyright wars that are happening at the moment. He's like, this is. It's abstract because we're treating this like a symbolic exchange, as if it's 1991, when what's interesting about this moment is that the way AI models learn is new. And no matter of linguistic games you can play Changes the fact that it's just a new problem. So if you have a new problem, then come up with new ideas to encounter it, by all means. But let's not pretend that this is Napster. It's not. It's completely different.
- [79:59]
B
Which is a problem, right? Because as you said, copyright and these things are. Are yesteryears. Technology that retains prestige and.
- [80:08]
A
Yeah, but to anyone under 35, to most people under 35, it's abstract, right? Like, as far as training permissions go, if you have a TikTok account, everything you've ever posted, they have the right to train on, or Instagram or Twitter, everything you've ever posted, right? So if we can, we can come. We can agree that that's kind of. These are the sites of creative exchange. At this point in time, you degree in the most part, you've already given it away. If you write for the Guardian, you've already given it away. Right? It's part of the condition that they have the right to do what they will with that thing that you just got paid 100 quid for or whatever it was like. So discussing copyright in this sense actually hits the bottom line of shrinkingly, like a very small group of people, you know, an illustrator who gets commissioned by Marvel to make pictures in their style or whatever, they've given away the rights for them to use that. That's how it works, you know. So it's a very abstract discussion to be like, my rights. I'm like, the unfortunate reality is you've already given away your rights. The more interesting thing is, do you want them to be exclusively used by the company that you gave them away to or by everybody?
- [81:16]
C
It turns out the crucial currency of the art world really was exposure.
- [81:20]
A
Well, there was some truth to, you know. Yeah, there was some truth to that.
- [81:25]
C
Matt, bearing all this in mind, what kind of world do you think we're heading into over the next 30 years or so? What do you want to see in that world?
- [81:35]
A
I don't know. I mean. Okay, so I think it's funny, given my role generally. I don't like to make predictions about the future because I think it's a fool's errand. That being said, I think it's really interesting to look back at, like around the turn of the millennia. So you say, okay, the Internet at this point and the consumer Internet, like the web as we use it, is about 30 plus years old. Could you have reasonably inferred in like, 1999 the world we're in now? I think you can. I think It's a really interesting exercise to do that. Like we're sitting recording a podcast outside of a, you know, On a space station. On a space station. Thank you. Yeah, of course. You know, and so I think that it's less. I could make like you could make some grand proclamations and look silly or you could say there's a solid bet that there are some things that are going to be incredibly consequential that should be taken seriously. And there's many different paths that could come from that. Right. So, for example, I think that the agent stuff, when you see, when you get into working with harnesses and agents, people get so into it that I guarantee that is its own medium and quite where it goes, I don't know, but that comes with, that brings with it its own interesting dynamics like the question of privacy. Right. Privacy, which is also an invention. Privacy is a very modern invention, a good one, I'd argue, in some cases. But this idea of always on ambient intelligence, listening to things. Oh, wow. We need to think of a lot of. There's a lot of different paths where that could go. Right. And I think that it's naive that there's kind of like post privacy characters who I think are a bit naive in suggesting that people are going to be super happy for everything in their, you know, everything they ever say to be listened to by everybody. I don't think that's true, but I think that there's something there, you know, so rather than making kind of bold predictions, I just say that there's areas where they're almost too. There's too much to ignore and there's degrees of, kind of, there's degrees of possibility in terms of where they go. And so those are the interesting areas to look at on a broader scale, maybe with the uk, I understand why some people within government are taking this AI thing very seriously. Right.
- [83:57]
C
Quite.
- [83:57]
A
Where it goes is another question. But I think that this should have been taken seriously 15 years ago, but now. But so if anything, without making too strong predictions about things, I just look at the web and I've had the fortune or misfortune or whatever to see. I'm of a certain age where I remember dial up Internet, I remember before the Internet and I've, you know, and I'm quite Well versed in LLMs and stuff such. I've seen all that. This is huge. Right. And so getting everybody at least on the same page, that it's not going away. And this is where the tension comes with a lot. You know, I have a Lot of sympathy for people who are encountering and somewhat kind of like shocked by some of the implications of it and the potential fallout. I do think there's going to be fallout for people, but at the very bare minimum, I'd hope that we can get on the same page that it's here and things can get really strange because then that's when you can start talking sense and negotiating for what you want. Right. So, yeah. So I think I don't see a world in which this. That is not impacted by these automated systems that happen to be getting really good at a clip of like, three months.
- [85:05]
C
Yeah, I don't think we do either.
- [85:07]
B
Well, you say that you don't use Claude code even though you're surrounded by people.
- [85:11]
C
I use Claude for coding. Do you? I have.
- [85:15]
B
You have.
- [85:16]
C
I've.
- [85:16]
B
Okay. Because I. The other day, automated part of my girlfriend's work to do a whole load of scraping.
- [85:24]
A
Yeah.
- [85:25]
B
But she, you know, that was five minutes with Claude. She could have done that herself, though. But there is definitely some level of people not wishing to adopt. Maybe that's just an adoption problem.
- [85:36]
A
There's, like, loads of really smart people who are just busy. Yeah, people are really busy. Like, I. But, yeah, but the closest analogy I could think of is it reminds me of getting to learn how to use the Internet, you know, And I think it's of that scale. And then people will come at it at different speeds, but it's just. It's too good. It's too interesting. And I mean, the fun. I was saying this to someone earlier, like, the. I was at a club, incidentally, with a German economist. This is after the Munich Security Conference, and when Vance had, like, rolled up and said a bunch of crap. And then so everyone was like, oh, God, what's this AI economy gonna look like? And I was like, well, you know, look around us. We're at, like, a club in Berlin in 2025 or whenever it was. And I was like, there's all kind of interactions that are happening here that would have seemed really abstract to people in 1999, but you could probably explain them to them.
- [86:28]
C
Right.
- [86:28]
A
So, like, there's people taking pictures of themselves and posting it to this network to influence. And I'm like, an influencer. Didn't really exist in 1998, but did kind of like, you would get. The most famous people on Earth would be sent out to Japan to, like, advertise a watch or something. So you could kind of explain. It'd be like, it's kind of like that. But for everyone. Or like, you know, it turns out that the, you know, the recommendations at Blockbuster for videos were worth more than all the films. Like, you know, like the people, the nerds there who are like, oh no, you really want to check this one out. It's like, yeah, it's the same thing. There's still films, there's still recommendations. It's just like the recommendations are where all the value was and the film, you know, kind of trails behind that. And you're like, the fun thing I like to think about with the 30 year question is being like, well, what is the latent interaction now that in 30 years time you're gonna be like, oh, of course that was it. Like, of course that's the value. And I was thinking like tour guides or like there's, there's all these things where you're like in the present don't seem particularly high status, just seem like whatever and you're like, but, but maybe, I don't know, maybe in this world or the clearest one, I think. And this is also a post Covid thing is like care work, you know, where it's like scarce, hands on, tactical help for people maybe taking on this new kind of dimension.
- [87:50]
C
Rockstar care workers.
- [87:52]
B
Yeah, or yeah, you'd be a senior software engineer.
- [87:55]
A
Yeah, I was about to say, yeah,
- [87:57]
C
exactly, yeah, senior bullshit working again.
- [88:00]
A
But like, but I think that's like the fun stuff is you're like, okay, what's the latent value? What are the kind of like conditions that seem somewhat immovable and yeah, how do you work in that kind of domain? You know, and you can also say with some kind of, with some certainty, and I'm not even celebrating this, but I just think it's ridiculous to entertain anything otherwise. It's is like it's probably not going to be the case that someone can make a really healthy living drawing for birthday Christmas cards. You know, that there are some things that have, you know, where the economics of that likely won't be a job in the same way, you know, and I don't, and I don't think there's any benefit when you talk about the arts and AI and so forth. There's no benefit to kind of not just being really direct with people that I think things likely will change and there's not much you can do. I mean, you know, from that basis you can then start having ideas about what you want, I guess. Yeah.
- [89:01]
C
I'm sure our landlady Harrod Green will be delighted that this podcast is ending on a Reference to Schumpeter's gale tearing its way through.
- [89:08]
B
Wow.
- [89:08]
A
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [89:10]
C
But, Matt, where can listeners find more? Where can they hear more from you? What can they look up?
- [89:17]
A
Yeah, I'm on, I guess, X a lot. It's just Matt Dryhurst. Matt with one T. Yeah. And we have a bunch of exhibitions over the next couple of years that I hope people will hear about.
- [89:29]
C
How long are you still exhibiting in Venice?
- [89:32]
A
Oh, yeah, that's a great point. Thanks.
- [89:35]
B
You're welcome.
- [89:35]
A
Yes, thank you. Yeah, yeah, we have a show on weather. Yeah. Strange Rules is at the Plate of Diego in Venice until November, and it'll be up. And we're going to have a big closing event where I'm going to try and convince a lot of. It's really cute. A few of the engineers who we curated, I don't think they understood the scope of it. So I was writing and I was like, hey, can you dust off this software from 20 years ago? And we were going to show it in an art show and I thought, that's really cool. But then when the art show actually happened, I was sending the pictures. I don't think they knew. For example, Ken Stanley's images are on every free vaporetto in Venice right now. And he's like, oh, maybe I should have come. I'm like, yeah, I told you. I told you you should have come. I told you you should have come. Maybe come in October. Yeah. So hopefully we can bully them into actually coming to the show now that they've seen that it's a proper celebration of their work.
- [90:29]
C
Amazing.
- [90:30]
B
Well, in that case, Matt, we will let you return to Earth and to the avant garde, leaving us reactionaries up in low Earth orbit. But thank you very much for joining us and to our listeners, thank you and goodbye.
- [90:46]
A
Thank you. It's been very fun.
- [90:48]
C
And thanks to Heron Green for hosting us.