Critical Analysis
West World
HBO Sci-fiction TV series
AI already has ability to deeply think itself. And they found they can be better than their makers. The TV series has not finished. And every episode reveals some fragments of story to sharply point out the topic of AI being human and human originally designed the whole story. Once one sentence pointed a main idea of the story. Dr. Robert Ford acted by Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins said to Bernard Lowe acted by Jeffrey Wright ‘the aim of reading a story is to see its end’. It reminds me to consider about an idea of quantum physics which is all activities in universe are movement of sub-atom and grain; and another idea reminded is human society may have the end just like a man finally dies., The point is though we all know we cannot avoid the ending like death, extinction, disappearance; we always cannot fully agree with other cultures, nations, races. And even just some questions like the United States President Donald J. Trump does not believe we are facing the problem of global warming. However, even if all human beings accept one political system, living in one country, sharing all resources; we still are not sure is it better for us.
Another essential idea of West world is also said by Dr. Robert Ford ‘The guests don’t return for the obvious things we do, the garish things. They come back because of the subtleties, the details. They come back because they discover something they imagine no one had ever noticed before. Something they fall in love with. They’re not looking for a story that tells them who they are. They already know who they are. They’re here because they want a glimpse of who they could be’. The meaning of these sentences is west world is for making opportunities of guests changing themselves. Actually it is a chance to observe how human behaviours change in the park, then Dr. Robert Ford can gradually adjust AI according to what he saw on other guests. Finally Robert programed a small code called reverie which makes AI thinks more like human beings. Programming in this story inspired me to think that Robert is like a god of AI, if in our real world there is also a man above us and programming us, what does life mean to us, and how can we awaken like those AI in West world, or maybe there is another man above the man who is programming us, and there are more above. And maybe one day, in our world when technology level is high enough, human beings are capable to program lower stage world, and we become the man above another world. I guess maybe this is the reason why we cannot exactly know higher dimension world. For example, we cannot go back on the timeline in our world, as we cannot move the timeline to see what was happened or what will happen, like we watching a video on laptop. But here I guess the higher dimension man who is programming us is able to watch us just like he watching a video on his device.
The Square
A movie directed by Ruben Stlund shows several absurd stories in a contemporary art curator’s life. Basically, the film mainly focused on the discussion of untrusted relationship between human beings and demonstrated when people do not trust each other; we will see weakness of humanity, embarrassment of contemporary art and other childish and awkward behaviours on adults.
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The first scene pointed out the relationship between artist and audiences is the leading actor Claes Bang acting Christian, an X- Royal Museum curator, was holding a lady on his laps and playing piano in a pub. Obviously, we know he wants to flirt with her, and maybe something happen then at later night. But the lady does not understand the art language of this music Christian playing, and she was just called away by her friends when Christian just immerses his quite subjective loving atmosphere. She has gone, he realized, and fond another lady was next to the piano, and then Christian asked do you know it? Another lady has gone away. He was awkward and tired there, which was quite funny when we saw the whole process of trying to flirt. This scene was so short just about 30 seconds, but it perfectly explains although we love art, art cannot be a person who we can share love and thinking with each other. It is a kind of rule that human beings always expect to have communication with an object no matter successful or failed. And art towards communication is always a tool, it cannot be the object.
In cinema, I and other audiences were laughing a lot. Because the duration of the movie is quite long, 2 hours 32 mins, I began to expect to see embarrassment in Christian’s life. Then I realized that what I laughing to was myself. I strongly felt every time I laugh was educated. Black humour to me is so impressive that I made my work Good is good which is good. And The Square reminds me the power of black humour again.
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys 2014 Phaidon Press Limited
by Allan Antliff
This book collected Beuys’s art career, mainly explained his installations in his early life; his time working in Kunstakademie Düsseldorf; he performing in New York USA and eventually organized several social events called social sculpture in German. The book has been objective as much as possible, as during the reading, I found that Beuys’s performances were always with disagreement from his audiences, and Beuys even fought with them. And the author did not hesitate to write those opposite feedback of Beuys’s audiences. Also the author compared Beuys’s I love America, America loves me and an American India artist James Luna’s performance called Petroglyphs in Motion, in order to point out the local artists have different opinions to what Beuys’s understanding of the relationship between American authorities and American India people. The most impressive Beuys’s work to me is How to explain drawing to a dead rabbit. The former work inspired me to think about the importance of perception in art. This work still has some clues we can trace back on surrealism and Dadaism, because the symbol of nature Beuys choose was a rabbit, but rabbit also could be some different animals or plants. And the whole work gave a sense of uselessness which was a significant point to question audiences why shell we explain to rabbit. Of course we cannot get the right answer if we just follow the logic of pragmatism and materialism. The key of the question is to feel. And that is what Beuys tried to tell people we had ignored human perception too long; we should really know our perception is another way which can help us being better. And that is what art really does in our life, to enlighten people the way of using perception. It was my starting point of considering about emotion, uncertainty and perception. Those things are not in some logic, so I need to learn how to feel, or to feel how to feel. Also the three things are all related to chaos theory, because the three incalculable things are so random, immaterial and multi-dimensional. Maybe that is only thing we never exactly catch by our eyes, but we can sense.
Chaos Theory
The secret life of chaos
Scientific Documentary by Jim AI-Khalili
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Everything and nothing
Scientific Documentary by Jim AI-Khalili
It is very interesting that after watching Jim AI Khalili’s physics videos, many things I tried to explain were very hard, but now I felt much easier though I have not explained successfully. Basically, he gives me more confident, or maybe I just do not fully understand those complicated theories so I put me into an illusion of ignorance. I was so inspired that there even is a theory pointing out the similar appearances all have relation between each other and this phenomenon is a typical evidence of a law of universe that self-organisation exists. (Self-organisation is also called spontaneous order, and means a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process is spontaneous not needing control by any external agent. from Wikipedia) Furthermore, it also reveals that somethings are similar, the connection between those things are being waited to explore. The interesting thing is that many abstract paintings are quite similar like fractal pictures. Fractal can be calculated by mathematics, whether human emotion can be calculated either, as abstract painting mainly reflects human emotion. When I know about chaos theory, I am just like a cubist meets Marcel Duchamp who directly draws me into chaos and excitement. Self-similarity may become my next study subject. And Benoit Mandelbrot had many study about simplicity and complexity. Now though I am not sure how much wide Benoit Mandelbrot had investigated this field, I still have so much interest on geometric forms, patens, chaos, simplicity and complexity. Those subject are all meaning still and quiet, but when those subject plus into dynamic, they would be more interesting.
The book is written by Will Gompertz. He as a senior of art world writes about so many hidden stories of artists and works, covered time from 1820 to 2006. One chapter is about Dadaism. Will Gompertz referenced his artist friend Maurizio Cattenlan’s work La Nora Ora, the ninth hour to explain Dadaistic works are the existence of irrationality, illogic and lawlessness. This part was quite inspired me to think about impact of art museums and galleries to art works, as Maurizio said all of his works rely on the environment of museums and galleries. If works exhibited in other places, they will not be such impressive. And Will summarised that museums and galleries give a chance for something will not be allowed to happen out there happen there. And trust is the key that people accept something happen in museums and galleries. Although people may get benefit from trusting people, it also brings threat. Therefore, people should stay alert at every moment in art world, just in case we will not be fool.
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However, Dadaistic artists always fool people and world that their creativity relies on, which is quite dangerous and unique, because only Dada successfully discovered a way that it develops by destroying the root of itself, art. I may say the balance of art is made by Dada destroying and other art forms building.
Will Gompertz