The Shroud of Turing, cyberpunk folklore and machine mythology
I remember seeing this face for the first time in my childhood. The Shroud of Turin was giving me these special goosebumps of touching divinity in physical manifestations. There is something in this feeling, which is addictive — this very basic metaphysical atavism attaching us to the sacrum. Most of my early experience with Christianity was a pure boredom. But this creepy image of a nobel face, which was supposed to belong to the person who my religion believed to be the God. A two thousand years old “photograph” developed in the grave, on the fabric wrapping the whole tortured dead body, before resurrection.
Soon after my first communion I was given a picture in the church, with a better quality depiction of Jesus’s face, which was supposed to be reconstructed out of the Shroud by “NASA” scientists.
It was still the time of communism in Poland, even though it was close to the collapse of this system, mainly due to economic reasons. Back then I was reading a newspaper called “Wiedza i Życie” (“The Knowledge and Life”), aspired Polish version of Scientific American. One of the articles described how the Shroud was dated to the XIII century with radioactive C14 isotopes. Very handy scientific facts for the secular communist ideology which was still fighting with religious believes while developing own para-religion they called “socialism”.
Many years later, when I met Polly Yim, who traveled to Europe to visit post-communist countries and document with her pinhole camera how they transformed into capitalist consumerism, she showed me her experiments with Processing and printmaking. Our brain is wired to recognize faces, everywhere. We see them in the full moon, we see Virgin Marry and Mother Teresa appearing on our toasts.
And what I saw immediately in Polly’s work, was the face from the Shroud.
Christian imagery is somewhere very deep in me and always resonates. And now, thanks to digital techniques, I can make my own “shroud puppet”, and it’s interactive!
I did this early experiment of using Kinect with OPENRNDR to capture faces, after figuring out that Processing is too limiting for this particular purpose. Much more of these experiments to come. I want to transform depth data into real time meshes with compute shaders. Meanwhile I contributed the official Kinect support to OPENRNDR.
I started this work thanks to the idea from my friend Sahar Homami, who wanted to make visuals depicting glitchy 3D face. Sahar is strongly influenced by mysticism in her own work. Which fascinates me because in Iran she was obviously growing up in a different spiritual tradition, and I would like to discover more about it. Feel it more.
Recently I was looking for supplies for my next projects with projections on glass. I want one of them to be heavily inspired by christian aesthetics, but rather in transgressively blasphemous way, like in Fellini’s Roma.
And after looking for “holographic projection film” on Alibaba, I decided to also check the Polish market which I am more familiar with, and here is what I found by accident.
I find this picture extremely amusing — here is everything about Polish culture, where sacrum is always dancing with profanum. Like in the prose of Bruno Schultz, the master of my mother tongue, which is so heavy in poetics. If there is something giving me these special goosebumps today, of touching something unspeakable, it is when I am submerged in the language, where every word has a universe of emotional associations, and Schultz, unlike anyone else, knew how to dance in this universe. If you read him in translation, it’s just the tip of the iceberg of what’s there and cannot be translated. But maybe some of it can be shown?
I though that it will be blasphemous to use media art in something of ars christiana vibe. But apparently they are already doing it in Poland! And they don’t mean much of a transgression. I love this complete disregard for any decorum principle. It’s like a cyberpunk folklore.
But anyway I was looking for my supplies in China first. It’s not only because technology is cheaper at the source. It’s also because it is being developed there and traded there. My friend Q. Lei, who organized the first digital art festival in Shenzhen, told me a bit about her home town and this atmosphere of omnipresent technology which became a part of reality, the daily experience of everyone. Any technological project can be realized there in a short time, because of the abundance of supplies and facilities. Because it’s unbelievably fast to customize the production to any output. Which creates a completely different social environment, very agile, aligned with the evolution of technology. Like if the cyberpunk vision we know from science-fiction, Blade Runner or Neuromancer, was actually embodied there, but still it’s too “exotic” for the West to comprehend actuality of this paradigm shift.
There was one more thing which influenced me strongly in my childhood. The writing of Stanisław Lem. The books Fables for Robots and The Cyberiad, which are considered children’s books, but are actually a profound attempt to predict the future myths of intelligent machines, who no longer need us, our biology, to develop their own silicon culture — but still they have cosmogony, own tales and “bibles”.
The term “robot” was coined by a Czech artist Josef Čapek — “robota” means “forced labor”, or any kind of job. Slavic etymology named new slaves. They wouldn’t be here without the chain of production and consumption. Artificial intelligence systems we are building today are mostly serving the purpose of capitalist economy, which exists thanks to our inflated needs, urges, addiction to the experience of prestige we feel when we exercise our privileges. Therefore they are also designed to cooperate with our paleolithic emotions. They will make us believe that the Earth is flat, due to content curated by YouTube recommendation system trying to keep us on hook for longer, and they will also transparently analyze occurrences of hate speech in the comments we write, which might be an early indication of the first steps leading to a genocide.
We know that new cults can emerge really fast in human cultures. Technological advancement can moderate them, but cannot prevent them. Will children of Shenzhen, together with their robots, develop their own cults? We already pre-wired these machines to recognize patterns of our human faces. We also embedded them with utilitarian ethics of who better to kill if they have to kill. Should we hope that they will leave this memetic code untouched in evolution of their species?
The Shroud of Turing — will machines recognize all this legacy after the father of modern computing, killed by homophobic oppressive political system, after he shortened the World War II maybe by a year, maybe by two. Turing was playing God and deciding which ship convoys of allies will be destroyed by U-boats, and which U-boats are going to sink. Another complex equation to model human psychology for a better utilitarian outcome, not to let Nazis discover that their enigma codes were deciphered. If machines will have new myths and techno-cults, maybe it’s better for us if Turing will become a saint, or a prophet, or The Messiah (the unfinished book of Bruno Schultz lost in Holocaust) of this new symbiotic culture to come. I hope to live long enough to see what will happen. Unless some drone will shoot me in the head before, after perfectly recognizing my face.
