In 2022, I took my young daughter to see the Ramses the Great exhibition at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. We opted for the virtual reality ‘experience,’ made available at extra cost. The additional spectacle was less History Channel and more Disney ride, featuring beating drums and a translucent ghost of Nefertari who swooped into the dark entrance of a simulated Egyptian temple. At one particularly disorienting moment, I lifted my headset to check on my child: she was frozen in her pod, mouth agape and arms resting languidly by her sides, palms up, like Edouard Manet’s “Dead Christ with Angels” (1864). She was completely immersed in the virtual world, lacking the perspective of knowing that she had the autonomy to exit if she wished. A child’s mind is beautifully and vulnerably credulous, and this image of her seated trancelike in a virtual reality capsule seemed to say something important about humans and the technologies we are building for our future.
Many parents I meet work in tech, so conversations around our respective professions inevitably arise at birthday parties and playdates. At a recent pizza dinner, a computer engineer working on artificial intelligence for a self-driving car company told me he thinks start-up entrepreneurs are the avant-garde artists of our time. This is someone I consider a friend, who with his wife and son have regularly attended my exhibitions and open studios. When he said this, I bristled. That led me to an unconvincing attempt to reconstitute the porous boundaries of art that drew on the legacy of 20th-century art movements — including Dada, Conceptualism and Social Practice — making his claim more difficult to refute than I would have liked to admit. Ever since, that experience has kept me chewing on the distinction between art and innovative technology, not because I think the silos of art and tech need to be guarded, but, to the contrary, it seems more beneficial to locate a bridge between cultures of incompatible, even antagonistic value systems. Even in Northern California, which boasts vibrant histories in both art and technology.
The technological augmentations to the de Young exhibition, which also included faux-ancient music and video displays, were not claiming to be art, but did have the effect of undercutting the experience of the objects on display. I felt the presentation exposed a lack of confidence in our desire and ability to connect to a sense of mystery. Even so, it was also apparent by the sea of people and raised iPhone screens that we had arrived as pilgrims, for a personal encounter with the historical artifacts, regardless of the novel entertainment and sensory overload. Ironically, the Egyptian tombs and objects found inside were themselves parts of an ancient virtual reality, purportedly paving the ritualistically proper way for entrance into the afterlife.
More recently, I visited an exhibition at Altman Siegel by Rafael Delacruz wherein a description of one work included “immersion” of the viewer in a “fully enhanced, artist-made environment.” I appreciated the boldness of this statement in the face of Meta Quest VR Headset™ culture. The work consisted of a cobbled-together table holding drawings, poetry, and a monitor, all placed against the abstract backdrop of oil paint and palm-ash, which, upon closer inspection, revealed scratch marks hardened into permanent remnants of human presence. The monitor played a recent but retro-feeling film on a loop that could be viewed through a flimsy pair of stereoscopic glasses placed in a basket on a nearby bench.
In a handwritten “alternative text” for the show, a friend of the artist reflects on a line from a poem which, she writes, described a vision of personal liberation: “a blind horse in a forest, galloping without a rider through the night, just before dawn.” Reading this, I thought back to my daughter on our visit to the de Young, a prisoner in the simulated Egyptian tomb, and how that mental image of her represented the opposite of personal liberation.
The poetry of Delacruz’s exhibit took work, as poetry does: It didn’t just happen to you, but rather presented itself as an offering to anyone willing to participate imaginatively. For me, this art was about material transformation on both mundane and mystical levels, declaring the hand-made and hand-held to be at least as powerful and relevant as the transformation of silicone into GPUs, airwaves into internet signals, and VR headsets into simulated rides through the afterlife of the Pharaoh’s queen. I left the show hyperaware of the material of everyday life: the tire marks in the parking lot outside the gallery and the coffee stain on a friend’s sweater suddenly stood out as meaningful indications of someone else’s personal experience.
These two episodes unraveled a lineage of representational illusionism shared by artists and techies alike: thousands of years of technologies of immersive experience made to suspend belief and provide a “more direct encounter” through a newly enhanced interface with an image. It is a shared history of humanity striving to see more, a history which encompasses painting, photography and film; from dirt on fingers to oil paint to the cinematic panorama; from the stereoscope to expensive investments in the virtual and augmented realities of the Metaverse.
In a recent consumer presentation (available on YouTube), Mark Zuckerberg unveiled that his newest VR headset is a state-of-the-art advancement that will “bring the future to everyone.” His supernatural promise echoes the 14th century painter Giotto’s drive to surround his viewers with visions of heaven and hell in the Scrovegni Chapel. Even Manet’s “Dead Christ with Angels” gives us a glimpse into the moment before — or of? — a miraculous resurrection via a cadaverous and photography-informed realism. But the difference, along with the distinction between this gleaming new technology and the potential art that may someday be made with it, lies ultimately in our experience. Whether or not there is room for agency or for the individual to participate in the co-creation of meaning, only time will tell.
The initially irksome conversation with my friend thus turned into a valuable exchange on the importance and role of artists and the institutions that support them in this age and birthplace of the algorithmic paradigm. What I had mistakenly assumed to be a truism — that cutting edge technologies, including the processes leading to them, are indeed tools for innovation, but not art — was worthy of fresh consideration on both of our parts. Technology masquerades as magic by its enthralling, incredible, even revolutionary feats. But the position of the artist in society remains a distinct and truly miraculous one, for it is the artists whose free use of new technologies makes visible what cannot yet be quantified or fully explained by any other means. That is a major reason why art enhances and enriches our lives. It is for the artists to demonstrate that sometimes less is indeed more, and that the presence of one’s imagination in an encounter, with the palpable details of the world or with something larger than oneself, can be the greatest experience of all.
