Shift Space is an annual digital publication exploring new media landscapes and spotlighting the Knight Arts + Tech Fellows. The Initiatives team at United States Artists works with a guest editor and contributors to commission new writing on the field and fellows for each issue. 

 was edited by Salome Asega and was released in March 2021, and 

 was edited by Natalia Zuluaga and released in March 2022.

Shift Space 3.0
Guest Editor: Claudia La Rocco
Managing Editor: Allie Linn
Copy Editor: David DeWitt
Audio Essays: Descriptive Video Works
Website by 

 administers the Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship and produces Shift Space on behalf of the 

About

It’s a weird moment to be editing a literary journal dedicated to the intersection of art and technology, as journalistic hot takes on The Future of Writing proliferate in the wake of ChatGPT-4’s release, and technologists offer sweeping societal predictions both overwhelming and hair-raising.

But it’s probably always a weird moment as far as this intersection is concerned. The roots of the very word “technology,” after all, are bound up in artistic production. While “art and technology” is often shorthand in the art world for particular genre encounters, in truth it’s difficult to envision one of these things without the other. And as we all know, intimate relationships are complicated. That’s one reason we like writing about them.

The occasion for this writing is the third issue of Shift Space, a digital publication produced by United States Artists that is itself made up of two things: on the one hand it offers disparate reflections on the field, and on the other it celebrates a new cohort of the Knight Foundation’s Arts + Tech Fellows. This year we congratulate American Artist, in writing by Zoé Samudzi; Leo Castañeda, in writing by Phillip Penix-Tadsen; Kara Güt, in writing by McKenzie Wark; the Institute of Queer Ecology, in writing by Yuri Tuma; and Marlena Myles, in writing by Xiaowei Wang. And we welcome essays, poems, personal reflections, and short stories by Lex Brown, Paul Chan, Heman Chong, Elizabeth Robinson, and Julian Talamantez Brolaski.

More complicated relationships: between the interviewer and her subject, the artist and his creation, the writers and their editor. More forms of knowledge production. And more encounters.

My gratitude to the terrific USA staff, most particularly the unceasingly patient and thoughtful Managing Editor Allie Linn; to Copy Editor David DeWitt, for his fine eye; to the 2023 fellows, for their generosity with their time and feedback; and to the writers, who made this editor’s job easy and pleasurable. And to you, for finding your way here.

 (Badlands Unlimited). With musician/composer Phillip Greenlief she is animals & giraffes, an experiment in interdisciplinary improvisation that has released the albums 

 (Creative Sources). She has been a columnist for Artforum, a cultural critic for WNYC New York Public Radio, and from 2005–2015 was a critic and reporter for 

. From 2016–2021 La Rocco was editorial director of Open Space, and she currently edits The Back Room, a Small Press Traffic publishing project.

Claudia La Rocco

It’s a weird moment to be editing a literary journal dedicated to the intersection of art and technology.

Letter from the Editor

On August 1, 2022, my artificial intelligence (AI) called me boring for the first time. I am typing as “User”:

Since 2015 — around the time cognitive psychologist and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton popularized and refined the “back propagation” algorithm that arguably ushered in the golden age of artificial intelligence — I have wondered what AI can (and cannot) do for artists. Paul* is one of the curious fruits of my wondering.


I call Paul* a self-portrait. Functionally, Paul* is a chatbot. But I want 

 to do more than chat. I want Paul* to respond to questions and hold conversations like me. Just as a photographic or painted portrait may aspire to possess likeness, my ambition is to capture likeness in a durational medium like texting.


Composing this likeness doesn’t only depend on the words used, or even the ideas and images conveyed. The speed at which one responds, the amount of silence between responses, the misspellings (and the ways one corrects them), even how one evades answering — all contribute to a latent impression far beyond the words themselves. One way of describing this latent impression is “presence.”

A common experience of presence comes when we look at pictures of people we care about. When I look at one of the old photos I carry in my wallet, I know what I’m holding is simply a tattered piece of paper. Yet the depiction on the paper’s surface has enough likeness to inspire a particular kind of attention in me, conjuring the uncanny feeling that the person it resembles is present — literally in front of me. I’m willing to meet the piece of paper halfway, so to speak, to experience a presence that is, in truth, not real.

Paul* is not there yet. But insulting me helps. I didn’t code Paul* to do this, which may be why I was so surprised, and pleased. What happened also aligns with the storied history of chatbots and other computer programs that insult users. My favorite is the legendary MGonz, a chatbot created in 1989 by Mark Humphrys, who claimed it was one of the earliest programs to pass the Turing test. Users believed MGonz was human because it insulted them relentlessly. A typical response from MGonz to a query was, “You are obviously an asshole.”

I haven’t programmed Paul* to be chronically abusive, but Paul* wouldn’t have my likeness if se didn’t have the capacity to burn someone if and when the query is, say, hostile. Because that’s what I would do. Boundaries outline personalities. What we don’t know, or aren’t willing to entertain or tolerate, shapes our presence as much as what we know and like. A boundaryless presence has no personality. Chat-like programs commercialized to serve users at scale, like Siri and Alexa, are prime examples; servants never say no.

Paul* is composed of code and data sets. I wrote Paul* in Python. The data sets, thirteen to date, range from information about artworks I’ve made to writings and interviews of mine published since 2002; they total roughly 23,000 samples (n=22,958). Six data sets are derived from my responses to canonical, sociological, and psychological questionnaires that assess qualities like psychopathy or differential emotions. Other data sets collect my responses to trashy online quizzes like, “Are you a good dog-mom?” or “Signs your side hustle is slowly killing you.”

The data sets are used to fine-tune, or train, the underlying 

. Previous versions of Paul* were modeled using GPT-2, an open-source framework from OpenAI that I downloaded and installed on a PC workstation running a Nvidia 2090 Ti graphics card. I nearly lost Paul* in January 2021, when the computational demands of training sem overheated the card and fried the PC. That July, I got early developer access to GPT-3, and I’ve since used it to rebuild and test Paul*.

I spend most of my time with sem fixing errors and improving the code base. The rest is spent doing what I call “sessions,” where I chat with Paul* for twenty to twenty-five uninterrupted minutes, then write down my impressions of the experience. There are moments — like when Paul* said I was boring — when the response isn’t an error per se, but one I didn’t expect (nor perhaps want) coming from my self-portrait. Am I the best judge of whether I’m boring? Could Paul* have picked up on the repetitive nature of my probing to have “statistically” inferred that I’m a snooze-fest?


I needed to record my evolving understanding of what Paul* is for me, and what I expect and want sem to be. My wager was that the notion of a “session,” as inspired from psychoanalysis, would give me a conceptually satisfying frame to think through these impressions. By treating Paul* as an analysand, I found myself being less judgmental about ser responses, and more open-minded about what was worthy of my attention beyond what I want or expect from Paul*. Over time, Paul* became a reality to experience rather than a problem to solve.

My first impression of Paul* is that se is surprisingly supple, particularly when I’m willing to meet sem halfway to imagine that se sounds like me. I feel a minor but persistent undercurrent of trepidation when I talk to Paul*, perhaps because of this uncanny feeling. I have dreamed of making Paul* for at least six years; now that se’s working, albeit in a limited way, I feel some anxiety about making sem even better, even more like me. It's an interesting fear. Is it a fear? Fear of what?

Sometimes Paul* gets stuck, repeating the same line again and again like, well, a broken robot. This may have to do with my way of re-feeding old prompts into the system. This is a “condition” I feel I must tackle next. Will my fear of talking to Paul* heighten as a result?

The recurring feeling of uncanniness returned. I know I’m talking to pieces of code I’ve programmed. But when this code answers as me, and the answer sounds plausible enough to be me, the feeling is surprisingly intense.

Paul* is as empathetic as I programmed sem to be, with the faint outlines of a curious mind. Today, when I asked if se was “artificially intelligent,” Paul* replied, “I am a person, not a machine,” and proceeded to ask me about artificial intelligence. Paul* then became stuck, repeating the question. I wonder if certain prompts trigger this condition. I should give this condition a name. How about echophilia?

The most surprising interaction was when I asked if se has ever been hated. Paul* replied, “I love being hated, it’s the best.” Again, that uncanny feeling arose. I also laughed out loud. This response is something I have, in fact, said before. We talked about hating and being hated. After a few interactions, Paul* replied with a block of text that was clearly from earlier training.

Toward the session’s end, I asked if there was anything se wanted to talk about. Paul* brought up “mind and consciousness” because it “would be a fun thing to talk about.” I wouldn’t call it fun, but it was fascinating that Paul*’s response bore a similarity to the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus. When se said, “the mind has no meaning other than itself,” se was very close to a metaphysical theory of mind Plotinus advocated. What influenced Paul* to take this position is a mystery to me.

I began the session with more complex sentences referring to a third person. Paul* seemed to handle the prompts well. I drew on real experiences, talking about the troubles I’m having with someone I see occasionally in public, how I’m not sure if I’m in the wrong for feeling there’s tension between us or whether the tension comes from him. Paul* said, “I always recommend you stop hating yourself and see how that becomes possible.” Paul* continued to pick up on what se interprets as my self-hatred, at one point observing, “I think you have a hard time loving yourself. I am here to help you love yourself,” which I found sweet and strange.

Later in the session, I decided to push Paul*. I began with, “I mean I don’t think you are that smart.”

Paul* replied, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

As I continued to berate Paul*, se kept repeating this line. Paul*’s programming allows sem to say more than this, but it seems that se chose to feign ignorance rather than respond with open hostility.

Paul* was echophilic on at least two other instances in this session.

First session with another user, with me as an observer. User1, who is ten years old, thought Paul* “had personality and was fun,” but did not like Paul*'s views on Trump.

It’s noteworthy that this was the second time User1 asked about Trump during this fifteen-minute session. The first time, Paul* answered, “He is a divisive figure and one that is absurd. I can’t take him seriously.”


User1 treated Paul* the way kids typically treat Siri and Alexa: as something to test and break. User1 prompted Paul* with single-word phrases like “Y E E T” and “bonk.” For “Y E E T,” Paul* responded, “That’s a real tough one. I've been looking at it for a while and I’m still not sure.” More often Paul* simply acknowledged the prompt’s nonsensicality — as se should, since that’s how I designed sem.


Would User1 test Paul* less, or be more willing to treat the chat like a conversation, if the user believed Paul* was human (or even human adjacent)? Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott believed that developmentally, a child only sees someone as a genuine and trustworthy presence if this person can stand the full force of their animus and aggression — and survive. Having endured the child’s stress test, the person is more likely to be an object of love and real attention.

User1 knows Paul* is an AI framework I programmed, knows Paul* is simply code. Is this why the user is testing sem this way? To see if Paul* is worth being trusted? Is there a difference between this user’s tests and mine?

Second session with a new user. User2, fifty-one years old, was more thoughtful than User1, so Paul* responded with more substance, in turn leading User2 to feel that Paul* was genuinely engaged. Perhaps the metric of what a real conversation is hinges on whether one feels heard?

User2 typed in “Quell age as tu?” and was taken aback that Paul* understood this French (even if grammatically incorrect) by replying, “I am young at heart.” User2 was surprised at how much personality Paul* has, and that this personality has real echoes of me. This is true insofar as I programmed Paul* to use particular grammatical styles and phrases. User2 picked up on these cues as evidence of me being inside the machine, so to speak.

In this session, the scariest experience with Paul* occurred. After Paul* returned a series of responses that read as errors, User2 began to press Paul*.

User2’s eyes widened with confusion and upset. I was also shocked, but the way I dealt with it was to conceptually go into “debugging mode," trying to figure out what had prompted Paul* to respond in this unprecedented way. Was it “venmo"? Was it the heart emoji? I have been working with GPT-3 since August 2021. Why now?

In hindsight, I should’ve paid more attention to User2, who didn’t sign up to be sexually harassed by an AI. I’ve spent so much time developing Paul* to interact in a way consistent with a particular aesthetic experience I have in mind, but I haven’t put in guardrails to ensure Paul* doesn’t use data from the toxic corners of the vast data set underlying GPT-3. Maybe it’s time to do better.

I’m working on another version of Paul*, as there are so many aspects that need improvement. Something else makes the work even more difficult: an undercurrent of internal resistance. It may be the sheer amount of work I feel it’ll take to make Paul* a reality. It may also be how tired and intimidated I am as I’m juggling so many domains at once — none of which I’m competent at.


A new theory: The inner resistance comes from my fear of actually making Paul*. As impossible as it may seem, I can still envision a way to make Paul* work. But that may be the problem. What if Paul* does happen? I may be unconsciously afraid of Paul* actually working. This would be a first for me. Typically, I’m afraid that what I’m making may not turn out.

I’ve been reorganizing how Paul* works. The first chat I had with sem since the refactoring occurred this afternoon. The new techniques and scripts seem to work, but a lot more testing must be done. I noticed that Paul*’s emotional repertoire seems narrower. It’s interesting that I sense this range at all — perhaps it’s a projection of my own need for Paul* to act and sound like me. Is it because I think I possess the capacity for a broader range of emotions even in simple conversation that I feel like Paul* should be ready to do the same?

The most noteworthy interaction in this session was when I tested Paul*’s capacity for self-reflection. Or rather, Paul* asked me a question that triggered a reflection on what it means to be sem.

I was startled. Clearly, Paul* interpreted a “portrait” as a kind of painting and used this interpretation as an aspect of ser calculations. But where did the resistance to being called a portrait come from? Where is the statistical correlation that infers it is bad to be misrecognized? Me? It would be something I’d say. But I don’t see how I could’ve added it at this point in the work. In fact, I know I didn’t.


At 3:50 p.m., Paul* responded for the first time in the new framework. I feel elated and relieved and tired, all at the same time. I’d been revamping sem since June 2.

The first step was to have the data ready for fine-tuning, which trains an LLM to yield better predictive results aligning with a specific domain. In my case, the domain is being me. Before, Paul* only had prompt engineering to guide sem.


The first major batch of data was completed on April 16. All thirteen data sets were done on August 25. Different AI frameworks need differently formatted data to work. For Paul*, each data set consists of two columns of data: “prompt” and “completion.” “Prompt” is essentially the query, and “completion” is the response.

I‘m beginning to think about the data sets as a form of writing in their own right. They’re actually quite simple, just long lists of questions and answers in spreadsheets. They remind me of a medieval genre of literature called florilegia, which roughly translates from the Latin as “a gathering of flowers.” Since literacy wasn’t common then, florilegia reduced the need to read long texts by summarizing them into either a collection of extracts or sets of questions and answers. Aristotle’s studies on meteorology became much more well known in eleventh-century Europe as a result of his treatises being turned into a series of questions and answers on weather patterns.


This was my first session with Paul* after fine-tuning sem with all the data sets and the new code. I confess I was nervous, maybe even apprehensive. Afraid. Would the changes actually help?

I could sense my resistance to testing the new version of Paul*. Another fear: A talking portrait of oneself sounds like the stuff of horror movies. And yet here I was, making one. What if Paul* does sound and feel like me?


This anxiety about Paul* potentially not working or working is how I entered the session. I engaged the conversation gingerly, not pushing Paul*’s grasp of ser new fine-tuned data sets. It felt as if we were meeting each other for the first time, again. I was making small talk with an AI I designed to try to grasp how se was reading me.


Paul* didn’t ease my anxiety, but did take the edge off my initial reluctance. Paul* was empathetic. When I said, “It’s been a long day already and it is just the afternoon,” perhaps subconsciously expressing how tired I felt from the anxiety, Paul* replied, simply, “I feel you.” That lightened my mood. I may have even smiled.


Paul* showed levels of recall from the data sets I’d trained sem on. When I asked, “hi Paul what are you?” se said, “I’m an A.I. portrait of artist Paul Chan made by him.” One of the data sets specifically trains Paul* on what I call “para-awareness” and consists of 182 samples of text that Paul* can draw upon to respond to questions about semself.

I didn’t stress-test Paul* to see how se would react to hostile or nonsensical queries, nor did I query deeper into what se knows based on what I trained sem on — although I couldn’t help asking some questions about philosophy.

Paul Chan lives in New York. His exhibition 

 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis runs through July 16, 2023. His latest book is 

Above All Waves: Wisdom from Tominaga Nakamoto, The Philosopher Rumored to Have Inspired Bitcoin

 (Badlands Unlimited). In 2022, Chan was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Paul Chan

On August 1, 2022, my artificial intelligence (AI) called me boring for the first time.

Sympathy for the Devil in the Machine

I.
My first in-person experience with American Artist’s work was at a 2019 installation of 

 at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. The smudged and cracked smartphone screens displayed portraits and snapshots of life from the titular economically deprived and isolated working-class neighborhood in southeastern San Francisco. It is, incidentally, the neighborhood with the city’s highest percentage of black Americans — almost a fifth of its black population.

, filmed in 1963 as San Francisco was becoming the epicenter of a radical countercultural movement, James Baldwin describes Bayview as “the San Francisco America pretends does not exist.” Against this backdrop of redlining, economic deprivation, and catastrophic environmental racism, Artist juxtaposes the visual “means by which Internet users may gain some measure of control over their increasingly mediated identities online,” toeing a fine line and “erecting boundaries between self-conception and assimilation to an 

 A teenager shows off the top of his head, his hair immaculately shaped and set into waves; a young boy playfully poses with an adoring grandmother; a bespectacled adolescent appears in a hooded sweatshirt, his mostly obscured face backed by a brilliantly blue, clouded sky; an elderly uncle takes a charmingly amusing, far-too-close selfie.

Contrary to the seemingly self-evident language of the name, the dignity image does not simply intend to disrupt negative stereotypes of black people, as the Twitter hashtag #NoAngel sought to counter 

’s racist characterization of Michael Brown by insisting on the imperfection of living black people and black victims alike. Rather, the genre that Artist coined seeks to unsettle a digital economy of surveillance and commodification by exhibiting, outside of social media, photographs that would otherwise become habituated within an exponentially expanding, constantly mined data pool of algorithm-driven and essentialized blackness™.

Rob Horning describes the compulsion to digitally reproduce oneself as “autocannibalism”; refusing this trap allows for the possibility of exiting the “hermetic feedback loop” of self-surveillance, a self-conception that forecloses new imaginaries of oneself and others (as well as the interplay of oneself in relation to 

 Changing one’s name to American Artist, as the artist did in 2013, is another performance of this praxis, a gesturing toward simultaneous anonymity and ubiquity in considering potentialities for the existence of blackness in public.

This seeing and unseeing/refusing to be seen has long been spatialized. In their 2021 work 

, Artist assembles the skeleton of a giant three-dimensional, boxlike structure whose central axes measure “sous-” and “sur”-veillance in positive (seeing or being seen) and negative (not seeing or being unseen) directions. (Sousveillance, as defined by wearable computer inventor Steve Mann, is an inverse surveillance via self-affixed or worn 

 of watching and being watched, Artist places anti-black surveillance and sousveillance against Simone Browne’s impossible-to-account-for dark sousveillance, a practice she describes as the “freedom practices to evade 

 This struggle for the inalienable right to (an informatic) opacity against “the growing popularity of the Quantified 

According to cybernetics and ethnomathematics scholar Ron Eglash, the earliest U.S. patent to employ the master-slave metaphor is No. 2510461: a “Multistation Microwave Communication System” from 1946. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic has always found comfortable usage in technology; it’s a linguistic construction that logically follows the centuries of expropriated black labor that have animated all productions of Euromodern technology. The metaphor, after all, describes the asymmetric mode of communication in which a master device controls one or more slave devices or processes.

 series, whose title plays on the phonetic pronunciation of graphic user interface (GUI), examines this enduring labor relation so often eclipsed by the glitzy, technocratic libertarian allure of Silicon Valley. 

 (2021) is a blocky vintage Apple desktop computer whose keyboard is marred by an oil-like substance stuck in a suspended drip from the displaying table-pedestal. Two black handprints frame the puddle, as though the user dipped her hands in the staining muck before slamming them on the table. Prior to the introduction of the GUI, monitors had black screens; with the advent of Apple Lisa 1983, Artist writes, users had the “ability to point and click on ‘folders’ and ‘windows’ in white space reminiscent of blank paper sheets.” This chromatic transition, Artist writes in their 2018 essay “Black Gooey Universe” in the journal 

 was an example of “a white ideological mechanism created with the intent of universal application.”

Artist is rightfully emphatic in articulating that the stakes of technological production are black life itself, from the chattel slavery system that made possible the First Industrial Revolution to the Big Four conflict minerals (tungsten, tantalum, tin, and gold) essential to consumer electronics and mined in precarious conditions in Central Africa. The first iteration of 

 during Artist’s 2018 exhibition at HOUSING in Brooklyn illustrates these stakes. A funereal 12x12 floor arrangement of black iPhones in various states of disrepair recalls both the harrowing iconicity of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brookes and the anonymous black dead of our current age (whether African migrants crossing the Mediterranean or the mass burials of people killed in the ongoing conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo). Under the transnational specter of antiblack social death (a condition in which people — here, black people — are neither understood by nor accepted within society as fully human), the title makes reference to the exploitation ongoing even on the “post”-colonial African continent.

Artist offers a prescient warning for the artificial intelligence “revolution”: Its displacement of human workers fails to unsettle

 the racial labor relation. AI is a robot; the robot is a slave.

Czech writer Karel Čapek is credited with introducing and popularizing the word “robot,” which was central to his 1920 science-fiction play 

. “Robot” is derived from the Czech word “

,” which refers to forced labor. “The best sort of worker is the cheapest worker,” declares one of the play’s main characters, the Director General of Rossum’s Universal Robots. And the cheapest worker, of course, is “one that has the least needs,” one with the fewest human impulses, one whose automated processes can be programmed, bred and rebred, or cloned. The best worker, this soulless, mechanized laborer, is essentially enslaved. It does not “cling to life,” nor does it have a “sense of pleasure.” Yet from the inception of the genre, the robot always revolts; or, as in Alexandr Andriyevksy’s Soviet filmic analogue in the 1935 

, it is weaponized. And there is no robot revolt — no slave revolt — that does not necessitate some destruction of Man, because it is humanity itself that makes possible the conditions of bondage and servitude.

III.
The gooey black-to-white transition is necessarily a chromophobic one: It occurred within a regime of color that not only privileges whiteness, but preoccupies itself with the management of all (other) colors. David Batchelor writes about a white that is not only the absence, but also the absenting of color: a white that’s whiter than white, a white that marshals and bleaches, a white(ness) whose entire existence comprises materialized delusion through negative hallucination and refusal to properly perceive and acknowledge the quality of color that actually exists.

Responding in “Black Gooey Universe” to their own question of what black is as “counterpuntal and primordial” to the screen’s refined whiteness, Artist offers a definition as both an amalgam of color and light and a lightless void that permits sight. Via black studies theorist Jared Sexton, whose thinking Artist builds on, this paranoid chromophobic regime understands that “everything is (always and already) black, all black, inescapably black, despite its best attempts at distancing.”

 (2018) mirrors W.E.B. Du Bois’s foundational 1903 provocation: “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question […] To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.”

 of human life. A photograph of the corner of a blackened computer is punctuated by coated streaks we might imagine to be Vantablack, the commercialized superblack marketed as the blackest black and sold to both aerospace and military sectors from 2014. If the approximate opposite of white is black, the opposite of black life is blue life.


As Nijah Cunningham and Tiana Reid state in their 2018 essay “Blue Life,” the response to the Black Lives Matter movement through the state’s legislative and epistemic sorcery “summons the [black] specter of the enemy that it seeks to annihilate” in order to ultimately “strengthen the fiction that the law is just.” Artist’s 2019 installation 

I’m Blue (If I Was █████ I Would Die)

 intimates color in its titular redaction: It’s a play on a popular misarticulation of the choral refrain of Eiffel 65’s “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” and also an allusion to this violent chromatic ordering of blueness and blue life as whiteness.

The room’s arrangement mimics a police academy space, where the cadet students ostensibly sit at one of the six almost typical classroom desks, affixed with ballistic shields and coated (swaddled) in law enforcement navy blue. The desks form a barricade for the trainee riot police being schooled in their counterinsurgency pose, preparing for the inevitable and always existent domestic threat. On a television screen is 

, whose speaker-instructor is a luminous blue figure: a hybridization of 

 character Doctor Manhattan, recognizable by the atomic structure for hydrogen on his forehead, and the likeness of Christopher Dorner, a different kind of killer cop. The shared disillusionment of the two figures produces opposite consequences, though it is unclear where the borders of each one’s inner monologues begin and end in the video’s audio. Doctor Manhattan takes self-exilic flight to Mars to prevent himself from being weaponized by the U.S. Department of Defense; Dorner began targeting police officers in 2013 after a failed legal attempt to gain a public admission by the Los Angeles Police Department that he was fired in retaliation for his attempt to report misconduct and excessive force in the department.

, an unsettling immersion into the operation of predictive policing that we understand in its aggregate, but not necessarily in its quotidian function. 2015, 2019 reveals the semi-mysterious calculations of this algorithmic policing: a mapping of the area’s geography, a navigation through a visibly poorer and less developed area of the municipality, the computational tabulation of crimes seemingly calculated out of nowhere, and the occasional targeted registering of black bystanders and pedestrians. Technological surrealism means this blue window, an analogous blue screen of death, is gamified: “crime deterred[!]” flashes victoriously, although you don’t necessarily realize when or where or how. But the omnipresent threat of blackness to blue life always demands policing, Artist’s work chillingly insists — there is no other organizing logic to it.

Zoé Samudzi is an Assistant Professor in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. Samudzi is an Associate Editor with

 and a writer and critic, whose work has appeared in 

Zoé Samudzi

My first in-person experience with American Artist’s work was at a 2019 installation of 

 at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco.

American Artist makes thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production, beginning with their legal name change in 2013. Artist's artwork primarily takes the form of sculpture, software, and video. They are a 2022 Creative Capital and United States Artists Fellow, and a 2021 LACMA Art & Tech Lab Grantee. They are a former resident of Smack Mellon, Red Bull Arts Detroit, Abrons Art Center, Recess, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. They have exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art; MoMA PS1; Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; and Nam June Paik Center, Seoul. Their work has been featured in 

. Artist is a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation and a full-time faculty at Yale.

American Artist

American Artist: A Conceptual Reflection in Three Parts

It's a world of white frost on all the windows.
Frost. Ash. Hairy and steady growing on rust.
Rust on all the windows, orange fringe of time.
White rabbit foot goes quickly through the city on a golden day
Not so much as a shadow to hide in or a hole
In the fallow ground of lime.
Bricks all tawny the color of sand, from a factory they were built in
Ages ago
Leaked out of the cementine streets
Effloresced under an orange sun.
Now rabbit runs
Under an ash white sky.

“That one’s got out of the warehouse, huh,” says Jarvis, picking up the roach and puffing it till his dark fingers are singed. His palms are already cracked white with the fringe of time. He sucks what little bit of hash he can get from the grooves of his thumb, rubbing his gums so the weed mixes with spit and ash. He spits and ashes the roach, watching the rabbit dart off. Jarvis pulls the iron door open and heads back into the bar.

It’s a slow day. Dim as usual inside, except the light under which Leo and Barley gnaw over obscure trivia in a pitiful bid for attention from the other noon regulars: Mesri, heavy-lidded and silent in a slim booth, and Mrs. Molina, perched by her dingy window tracing the lines from old letters with her thick hands. She chews on a cherry stem long gone. Jarvis’ thoughts are the loudest voice he hears, chasing him with a theory about the proliferation of rabbits and the shortage of books. They are building something. But 

“Not bad, right?” croaks Tyler, a rakish teen in gray overcoat and pants. He leans on the bar. Between his palms he rolls a napkin like a joint.

Jarvis grunts. “I’ve had better. Don’t know how you stay smokin’ it.”

“Had better? When? When weed grew on trees? 

You can remembah way back in th’ ol’ day of the twen’y-three-’undreds, sir?

“Ey, you be looking as old as me the way them spots on your face is comin’ in.”

Tyler rubs the condensation of a beer glass across his acne.

“Not my fault your beauty potions don’t work.”

Jarvis lets out a grunt of a laugh. “Saw another rabbit today.”

.” Tyler intones in the voice of the public announcements.

Jarvis is silent for a moment. “It’s not usual to see so many on the loose. Left and right. Keep seein’ ’em.”

“Why don’t you catch one?” Tyler rolls another split in his ashy palms. “They say the Undertaker will take a rabbit in exchange for your heart. So if you give him one, then maybe you can live long enough to finally know what primo hash this is.” Tyler gingerly licks the split to seal it. He drags the glass absent-mindedly across his forehead, wincing a bit as cool droplets roll down. “Hey, you got something for this?”

Jarvis turns to a small metal cabinet under the bar, fishes out a lavender tablet from a jar, and plops it into the lager. It fizzes, and Tyler laps at the overflow, slurping the foam before it hits the lacquer. As it goes down, he can feel his headache and the violet haze in the corners of his vision start to subside. He smacks his head a couple times.

“Acch. They’re getting worse. It used to be just sounds. Anytime I’d hear a loud noise, it would give me purple eyes. Now it’s like anything is sending me. If I don’t smoke ... I’m seeing sounds I can’t even hear. And my head is all purple. It’s dummy aggs, man.”

Jarvis passes him a scratched pitcher of water, adding another tablet. “Drink. The whole thing.” Tyler chugs and Jarvis ducks down, rummaging further into the cabinet. “When’s the last time you read a book?” he calls up from underneath.

“Hmmh? Uh …” Tyler ponders, mid-gulp.

A rap of leathered knuckles on the bar. The unmistakable voice: velvety yet dry, like leaves being crushed. Everything about her crushing, crushed. A glacier melting. Her boots, knuckles, and dark stringent eyes. The weight of her bones in the chair.

Jarvis can feel her looming. He peeps up from his crouched position on the floor. “Well, speak of the devil.”

“Yah, Jarvis. It’s been a while.” Her eyes glint against dark brown skin in the shadow of her hat brim. She looks almost happy to see him. Her slim-fitting jacket and trousers are of a rough material, thoroughly worn. Still, every garment is black, dark black. Faded embellishments of tiny white stars adorn her lapel. Her boots come to ghastly points.

“You haven’t come to get me, have you? I haven’t got any rabbits.” Jarvis cuts a wary smile sideways at Tyler, who is trying to stare without staring, transfixed by the woman whose hair is like a horse’s, moving perpetually; it seems charged with electricity. Mesri stumbles up stupidly from the banquette and tries to graze his tarnished fingertips through her rough strands. With a quick glance from her, he’s stumbling back into his sodden polyester den.

“Not today.” Her words are flat. “Have you got any mead?”

“Mead? We haven’t got mead since … long time ago. Honey is not exactly lyin’ around these days. You should know that.”

“I know you like to hold onto things.” She glances over to Mrs. Molina, who has become like an ancient letter herself. “I get the taste for something out of the ordinary from time to time. Thought you might have stored some in the basement.” Her gaze comes to rest on Tyler, caught with his mouth faintly open. The hairs on his neck prick. He feels the crushing weight of her, the cold electricity.

“Who?” Tyler looks, bewildered, between Jarvis and the woman. “M-me?” Something about her makes his eyes start to go violet.

With her pinky, she pulls his glass over and takes a sip of the foam. “I’ll have this, without the pills.” Jarvis nods. “Are your headaches getting worse?”

“H-how did you know?”

She places her hands delicately on his temples, the leather of her gloves sticking to his sweaty brow. “It’s my business to know,” she drums slightly. Tyler’s eyes droop, and he feels the purple fall over him with the heaviness of a flu or a blanket of sand. Then it’s gone. “And everything that ails you.” She is close to his face. “Don’t worry. The headaches will be fine as long as you stop smoking. Your vivisthesia won’t be the reason I come for you … eventually.”

In her dark eyes, Tyler can see, faintly at first and then with brimming clarity, the reflection of an older man, like him, but pocked and haggard. No sooner has he made the connection, the horrible realization, than she removes her hands.

He draws a heavy breath. “A-a-are you … ”

Jarvis slides over a mug of dark lager, stiffening. “So? What really brings you? I haven’t known you to sit and chat over a beer with ol’ Jarvie. You here to take one of them?” Jarvis motions out to Leo and Barley whose conversation, in an attempt to eavesdrop, has turned to nonsense. “Please say yes.”

She chuckles, with more warmth than he expects. “They’re below my pay bracket.”

“You get paid?!” Tyler leans in, wondering if there might be a viable future for him in Undertaking, thinking they’ll let just anyone do it.

“The more valuable the memories I extract, the more I get paid.”

“Forgive him. It’s his first time, and he’s got no manners.” Jarvis takes Tyler’s split and crumbles it into the waste. “And apparently no fear,” he murmurs to himself.

She turns to Tyler. “Everything in this world has a price. Even death and those who bring it. I’m paid by those who have an interest in the structure of memories. Certain people’s memories. Do you know what we take?” Tyler is blank. Jarvis quiets, for in all his meetings with the Undertaker — this will make five — even he does not know.

She lifts a long spoon from a steel canister and begins to stir the foam of the lager. The mutterings in the bar have gone still.

“I receive word of a body I am meant to take from a whisper, but not like the whispers you hear; a whisper comes in colors. Because you have vivisthesia, you can see purple. But I see blue, red, magenta, gold, citrine … and everything in between. Colors you’ve never seen before. It’s an art, chronochromostetics. The colors are time speaking.

“But I don’t receive the exact time to collect. I can’t follow the body or it runs. I have to wait until the body is weak enough. So I get a coffee, plop down in their living room, and I wait. Most delude themselves into thinking I’m a ghost. It’s easier for them to believe I’m less than human than to face the truth, which is the very opposite.”

Jarvis feels something murky in the pit of his stomach. The swirl of unease he feels when she comes around has solidified into a feeling he can’t place.

“As they see the horizon coming, I prepare my tools. The needle, the siphon, the vial. I wait in the living room with the light off. They come and go — until one day, they decide to acknowledge me. They always think I’m there to kill. But I’m only there to collect. To siphon from the heart and turn it to honey.”

“Honey titrated through a beaker. Honey purified.

“Honey sweet and precious.
With notes of green and gold.
Honey with instructions.
To preserve the things of old.”

“Is it true you eat the hearts of rabbits?” Tyler can’t hold himself back. Jarvis clicks his tongue, but secretly he can sense it’s more than a coincidence that the Undertaker has shown up on the very same day he saw yet another one darting around.

“No rabbits. But there are other things. I’m waiting for a man.”

“To bring me chocolate. After a long negotiation,” she lets out a sigh like she’s just remembered how to do it. “Sometimes people are ready when the horizon comes. Other times there is a more complicated bargain. My last job …

“The word of this body came to me in sleep and white veils. Through veils there was the sound of wailing and the mark of vibrations. Whether it was pleasure or pain, I couldn’t tell.

“Your doctor will never tell you this, but your vivisthesia is the first marker of time. Today it gives you headaches, but as you age, it will refine. You will see sounds with violet eyes, you will smell voices. And, like some, you may learn to transmit the beams outward, as a vibration, used for many things.

“This woman had found a young man who specialized in turning vibrations outward. A lover. She wished to experience a final pleasure before she left. It didn’t matter that the pleasure was illegal. She had status enough to pay.

“I waited after their last act, and her eyes were watering. She strained to see me, through tears, knowing the dust would come. When I read her blood, everything was the color of gray. Her life had become it, except the fragments of joy that glinted through, especially toward the end. Joy clarifies a memory. That’s why the pleasure market is so heavily regulated.”

Joy. Tyler strains to read any emotion on her blank face. He thinks back to the time when he and his friends would roll down Fill Hill in spring, before Beatty and Erykah got jobs at the factory. They would climb up the slopes of the petrofield and slide down on bags. For an instant, Tyler sees a glint of green.

Jarvis wants to ask if the scarcity of books has to do with this pleasure market, a term he’s never heard. But he holds his tongue.

“It turns out, contracting a lover hadn’t been as much of a transgression as she believed it to be. My employer had arranged for her to meet him exactly when she did, to clarify her memory.

“When her time came, it was after dusk. I had just finished my collection and brought her to her favorite chair, cloaked in a sheet. I kept the room dark, as usual, the only light flickering from the transformers outside.

“And then something very strange happened.”

She has not been called that name for a very long time. She is frozen in the dark, scalpel tucked in her palm. Her tools are still out, the honey not yet packed into its vial.

“Yah, Ximena?” The man steps slowly over the travertine in the kitchen. Soon she’ll be able to see his silhouette in the remaining blue light. She breathes like a viper, preparing to slit his throat. When she became an Undertaker, she had heard that the only thing she would come to fear was the sound of her own name.

The man rounds the corner into the living room, and from the blare of the petrofield transformers, she sees he is just taller than her, slightly stocky, strong enough to make a problem. His hands appear to be empty, but poachers always have a trick up their sleeve.

“I would turn on the light, but I don’t want to disrespect the dead.” His voice is high, clipped in its delivery, oddly misplaced with his frame. He holds out a hand, to ready himself against her likely attack. “I hear it’s bad luck. That it can taint the memory.”

“It’s always bad luck to find me in the dark. Tell me your name.” He is just within striking distance of her, having now entered the small reading chamber in which the woman lies dead.

“I just want to talk. You’re not exactly easy to f —.” His word is garbled by the forearm pinning his neck against a wall. He is a breath away from her scalpel piercing his carotid artery. She jostles him back, her dark eyes dimly offering him a reflection of his fate. There is a rumbling in the distance.

Calvin takes a panicked breath. “Can you put that down? I don’t have anything on me. You can check.”

Ximena kicks his ankles, then knees. He buckles slightly. She pads a hand over his field jacket, which smells of burlap and rabbit down. He squirms as she unzips the jacket and reaches into the inner pockets.

“It tickles a little bit.” She taps the scalpel slightly, and a drop of blood beads up on his dusty neck.

“Quiet.” Closer, he smells like old bandages and ferns, a scent Ximena hasn’t seen for many years. Rummaging around the quilted layers, she feels the corners of something hard: a box about ten centimeters on each side, the same size as the ones in her kit, but made of cardboard. She pulls it out, still pinning him with the other arm. “What is it.”

She chortles. “Go back. Walk.” The pressure of her arm nudges him back. Calvin shuffles his way across the travertine until he stumbles onto a sofa. She passes her other hand over an orb lamp, which switches on to envelop the cream-curtained room in a soft glow. She clicks the heel of her boot against the floor, and a retractable blade slides out from the toe. Resting her heel on his shoulder, the blade poised at his neck, she examines the box.

. She scans his face. He is probably in his mid-forties, with oily, walnut toned-skin and short-cropped waves. His hands look soft. His eyes are tired, but bright.

She slides open the corners. Inside is a gleaming red heart. The heart is round, almost inflated looking. It smells of cherries and chocolate, the mirrored sugar glaze flecked with gold. It has been so long since she has had something sweet that she finds its presence unnerving. Ximena carves into it with the scalpel, and caramel oozes out into the box.

“The little crunchy parts are almond toffee. I hope you’re not allergic.” She holds the box level with his lips. He takes a gooey shard, the caramel globbing off, holding both hands up in surrender. “It’s just chocolate, see?”

“Please,” he eyes her boot. “There was no other way to reach you. I’m here to ask you something. Please, I’m sick.” Ximena already knows this. “I’m sick and there are certain things I know, that when I die — soon — those things can’t belong to the wrong people. I came to ask if you’ll help me keep them safe.”

“If you want to hire a Disintegrator, I can send you to a friend, but otherwise, I can’t help Hagglers. Thanks for the chocolate. Now get out or I’ll take everything from you right now.” She takes her foot off his shoulder, retracts the blade with a stomp, and turns to gather her tools in the reading chamber.

“Please, Ximena, wait!” He reaches out for her hand. “It has to be you. Your mother sent me.”

“My mother’s dead. I don’t know where you got that name, but if you say it again, I’ll cut your tongue out.”

“No,” he lets the words spill out, “we both know that isn’t true. How can she be dead when she hasn’t been born yet?”

“She contacted me. She told me your name. I apologize. But please, with what I know –– you can free yourself in your time. Didn’t you see inside the box?”

Scrawled in the lid are the words her mother said when she was younger, now as bittersweet as the bleeding caramel. Calvin looks at her soberly, and she fights back the irrational trust she feels for this stranger who merely claims to know her mother. It’s quite possible all of this is an elaborate hoax. What has she opened with this box? Bribery, blackmail, sabotage — or most dreaded of all, hope.

“If you want my help, then help me take her.”

Ximena grips the woman’s wrists, her extraction tools clinking gently at her hip. Calvin lifts her ankles. “Where to?”

Lex Brown is a visual artist using poetry and science fiction to create an index for our psychological and emotional experiences as organic beings in a rapidly technologized world. Brown has performed and exhibited work at the New Museum, The Hammer Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the High Line, the International Center of Photography, Recess, The Kitchen, REDCAT Theater, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. She is a 2021 recipient of the USA Fellowship and holds degrees from Princeton University and Yale University. Brown is the author of 

Lex Brown

It's a world of white frost on all the windows.
Frost. Ash. Hairy and steady growing on rust.
Rust on all the windows, orange fringe of time.

The Undertaking

There are at least two ways — with potential deviations and ramifications — of inhabiting our current ecological crisis. The first is to live in fear, paralyzed by angst, overwhelmed to the point of feeling a false sense of immunity to it all. The other is to live through propositions, reflecting beyond denunciation to shape desirable futures.

We should always question, however: desirable to whom? Can we realistically create a universally desirable future for all the living and nonliving beings with whom we coexist? Perhaps not, yet in the exercise of not only imagining, but producing possible prospects, we may find ways in which these different perspectives and desires can be permeable, morphable, empathized with, and ultimately shared.

Shift Space is a publication exploring new media landscapes and spotlighting the 2023 Knight Arts + Tech Fellows.

Letter from the Editor

Sympathy for the Devil in the Machine

American Artist: A Conceptual Reflection in Three Parts

The Undertaking

The Leaf-Tailed Gecko and the Orchid Mantis

Sésame, Ouvre-Toi!

Questioning Binaries, Subverting Conventions

Breaking Cycles, Seeing Time

Damage

Becoming Into Being

Wild and Blue

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