Andrea López Bernal

What was the starting point of your research project?

In the 18th century, a man built an automaton chess player machine to impress a lady. The machine was beating intellectual celebrities who traveled ready to be challenged. This “machine” called Mechanical Turk for its exotic look continued working for almost 100 years.

What they didn’t know is that sitting under the table there was a chess master hidden performing the movements of the so-called Turk. In 2005 Jeff Bezos opened an Amazon crowdsourcing platform called Mechanical Turk, employing thousands of people that were willing to perform tasks that the human found easy but the machine couldn’t solve by itself. The platform consciously feeds on the illusion that AI systems are magically smart and autonomous. This magic also claims to know how to read emotions by reading faces, and not investigate what is actually behind that emotion, as in the case of the company Affectiva, acquired by SmartEye in 2021. I can be nervous in a job interview which doesn’t mean I am always a nervous person. Right? In this research I found myself getting more and more interested in what is behind “the magic” of AI.

What has been your approach for the fellowship research project and how does it relate to the role of research in your practice?

I will have to mention March 2023, it was a 3 day workshop called “the accident” attended by students of the Dirty Art Department. On day 2 we were feeling quite tired after some food and discussions on the expectations of day 3. So I asked them to lay down to induce them into a relaxing guided meditation. The guided meditation lasted 5 min which for them felt like a good 30 min nap. I was walking around the surrendered bodies, some of them having relaxation spasms, I was modulating my voice to accompany them through fields, the sunlight and the comforting breeze until they let go of their mind into a semi conscious level. For me it was a very special moment. Some of them remember the whole trip, most of them don't. On the third day we made a fire, it was lovely.

Your body of work, particularly projects like "Blinded by Shine" and "Teeth," exhibits a profound engagement with the human body as both a physical and symbolic entity. Can you elucidate on your research process in navigating the intersection of personal and collective experiences, especially concerning bodily expressions and their resonances within social and political spheres?
The use of varied materials and references, such as work done in a vineyard during harvest, dental interventions and spirit stories, appears to be integral to your work. How do these eclectic elements inform your research, and how do you approach the amalgamation of such diverse materials in exploring the notion of choreographies and authenticity across such different spheres of human experience?

I was given “AI” as a prompt to study. I was passionate about the idea of integrating AI in my practice, even though at the beginning of the research I felt quite distant. As the research continued I understood AI not only as a tool of creation, which was my instant response, but more as a complex apparatus that camouflages purposely a wide process where the human body, emotions, the use of planetary resources, and many other processes. It became a ride of unveiling ghosts that have always been very close to me.

For the last project, I worked on “Noveltelenovela”1 I played many roles created with scripts from ChatGPT with prompts from the visitors to the installation. I played to be the transmitter of its narrations, characters and situations, in the most authentic way. I played a murderer with a banana as a gun, a loving partner missing teeth, a shy lover, a person who wakes up with the mouth on the back of its head, among many other roles. That POV is something I still think about.

In the setup of the “Noveltelenovela”, ChatGPT was fixated on making me crush, eat and squish the fresh fruits. It was so unnatural, we kept on feeding it with prompts to -quit the fruit- the algorithm was coming back to it on and on, almost as if trying to find authenticity of natural in a very unnatural way, ChatGPT knowing that in set there was a body and fruit, made sense for the elements to interact even though there was no purpose. In the vineyard, we had a task and the body was our tool, in telenovela, my body was violently confronted with non-sense emotions about the fresh apples.

1Andrea López Bernal, Sophia Simensky and Leslie Lawrence. NOVELTELENOVELA, week 5 of 55 projects in 52 days, at W139, AMS, NL.

Alarm

I have always been interested in death, just as someone who travels early in the morning will always appreciate the alarm ringing. I believe that every once in a while we should experience a terrifying, loud alarm in order to keep each other awake from the dream of reality-artificiality. Understanding artificiality-reality as a complex creation of social agreements to establish an order—the alarm vibrates so hard . . .

In terms of staging something that isn’t supposed to be staged, I focus my interest on “staging intimacy.” I believe it is possible to stage intimacy in order to create atmospheres of pure honesty. If I cannot recreate near-to-dead experiences, I can at least attempt to access authentic, intimate spaces where the vibration of the alarm is palpable—almost like following steps to mimic a reality that overlaps different times. If the narrative is not linear we are able to overlap atmospheres that can disturb the normal.

2 November 2023

This time you are there first. I roll my working table through the door to enter the big gray ceiling room, in the middle of the space there is a donut-shaped table. I insert myself into the space, singing from the outside of the room:

“Alma mía, sola, siempre sola, sin que nadie comprenda tu sufrimiento, tu horrible padecer . . .”

I have your attention now. I sit in a rotating chair and take my computer to start telling you what I’ve been busy with for the past year. You are silent, attentive to the next move.

Tension.

Jose, my friend, is laying on the floor, eyes closed. I hope everyone is comfortable. I tell the story of a cute horse to warm up: Clever Hans. Clever Hans was the first creature that inspired me with this research on “Performance art and AI.”

Carl Stumpf was a scientist—science? Doctor? Mmm—I am confused, it’s not what I want to say. I look to the window for clarity on a static motion. “Was this moment of silence planned?” you wonder.

Psychologist! That is the word I was looking for!

What is referred to as the Clever Hans phenomenon (img Clever Hans phenomenon personal interpretation) can get more and more detached from what I believe is the truth but most important, THE OTHER.

But wait,

who am I then?

I present myself with all the valid IDs I have, to prove what I say, name, nationality, birth, medical devices in my body, and medicine I take in order to make me functional in society.

I take a moment to think while the SLIDES I show on a screen move back and forth to “ID MOMENT DATA” to “VIOLENCE,” back and forth, back and forth.

I prepared myself to go to the middle of the roundtable. Eva turns off the lights for me. Thank you Eva. I go calmly to close the curtains, I have the key to do so,

click and maintain.

The sound is magnificent, mechanical, calming, the curtains are huge, I go for the first, the second . . . click and maintain.

My friend Jose has been lying comfortably on the ground since I began my entrance, remember? Before the horse?

Now Jose is asleep. I softly wake him up; he wakes up and automatically plugs in a spotlight to point at what now I am preparing as a narrative ritual.

I explain a ritual I saw in Mexico—San Juan Chamula, Chiapas, 2022—where chickens were sacrificed, praying in a language I couldn’t understand and pine needles covered the floor, long candles were lighting the church where a mix of pagan and catholic blurred lines. (My attraction to these rituals is confusing, seems like a need of something solid where all around what is supposed to work is not working: politics, sanitary sistemps, education, laws, human rights.) This “real” feels for a reason more hopeful at the moment.

I narrate what I saw and I perform some of the actions. I act as if I kill a Chicken Bao, squish it until the plastic stops making sound, after popping. The smell of the candles and the pine tree needles mixed with some alcohol held in coca cola bottles gets back to me occasionally. My nose hasn’t been the same since Covid, sometimes I even think I lost my smell memories and I’m replacing them with this new damaged brain. Luckily humans, we work with smell archetypes—or unluckily.

I pass by the coca cola bottle that I have prepared to seal the enchantments I ask to the fire, the sounds and the smell. As an act of trust and maybe friendship you drink out of the bottle. Yikes, you were probably not expecting the strong liquor jijiji . . .

Lights go on again, I go back to my table. Thank you, Jose.

I feel like dancing, but not yet. I’m gonna do it later and have a fun time; you are looking, not dancing, just me.

Before dancing, I want to take a moment to remember the times I worked together with the students of the Dirty Art Department (I can tell you that on another occasion).

My mind is getting blurry now. I wish you were there to hear what I so desperately wanted to fit in a one hour presentation. I want to talk about body injuries; I want to talk about the human aspect of the AI apparatus, who’s working behind this monster; who is dedicated to classify. I want to dig in on how to classify what is ungraspable. I want to talk about materials, the matter necessary in order to make the AI hardware work. I want to tell you how interesting the effects are when those elements behave with fire, or are used in ceramics. I brought myself a piece we made together. I added neodymium to that piece and now it is beautiful, even more so than before.

Please do not think I don’t want to be generous with you now, it’s just . . . you know, I am working on strategies for transmitting my work when I am not there and it is still bugging me. Might be me romanticizing performance art or my not-yet capability to transmit my subjective eye. I am on it.