YOU HAVE TO LET GO OF THE PAST
Anicka Yi often collaborates with biologists, chemists, engineers, and other specialists. For her 2019 line of fragrances for Comme des Garçons, Biography, she worked with French super nose Barnabé Fillion. One scent, Radical Hopelessness, was inspired by Hatshepsut, the second female pharaoh of Egypt. Another, Shigenobu Twilight, by female Japanese Red Army militant Fusako Shigenobu. The third, Beyond Skin, which Yi has described as “the AI one,” has notes of myrrh, indole, rose, civet, cloves, and red seaweed and was designed to evoke a new woman constructed by engineers. This is also, in a sense, Yi’s project today: to build a new woman.
“I was obsessed with the future,” she once recalled of the mid-2010s. During that time, for her 2015 Kunsthalle Basel exhibition, “7,070,430K of Digital Spit,” she had catalogues made from handmade incense paper laced with an aroma she and Fillion had developed to smell of “forgetting,” which was ritually burned in the space every day. It was a show where you went to forget. “I had convinced myself,” she continued, “that I was brought from the future to compost our present, so that we could transition to the future.” I appreciate this approach very much, especially now, a decade on, when the contemporary art world has become so backwards facing, traditional, and nostalgic.
This September, Yi will open a major retrospective, “There Exists Another Evolution, But in this One,” at the Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, later travelling to UCCA in Beijing. She does not like survey shows, because there’s not much for a living artist to do, so around half of this one is comprised of new works. “That’s what excites me, what really ignites my imagination,” she says, “wanting to work and to be in the present. I don’t really like looking back too much into the past.”
EACH BRANCH OF CORAL HOLDS THE LIGHT OF THE MOON
The show opens with a new fragrance, for which she asked Fillion to imagine dark primordial soup, biologized machines in the deep, a bioluminescent tree blooming underwater. It brings notes of citrus and algae, accents of gasoline and petrichor. It smells like the beginning of the world.
The exhibition’s centerpiece is Each Branch of Coral Holds the Light of the Moon (2024), a digital animation of what looks like zooplankton floating in a virtual ocean. To make it, all fifteen other bodies of work included in the exhibition — among which are contact lens aquariums, tempura-fried flowers, kombucha-skin sculptures, quarantine tents, kelp lanterns containing animatronic moths, neural-network paintings trained on her archive, hanging radiolaria machine-sculptures, bioluminescent bacteria sculptures, biofouled sculptures, the new fragrance itself — have been transformed into generative characters. These translucent, imaginary protozoan artwork-beings possess different physical qualities, such as size, shape, luminescence, and material, as well as eleven distinct behavioral, sensory, emotional, and evolutionary attributes. For instance, a tempura flower has the social structure “group,” an electroreception attribute of fifty, playfulness of forty, and a mutation cycle of eighty. Yi’s organisms are brought to life in a game engine, where they morph and mutate, interact with each other, and evolve like Precambrian life, accompanied by a shimmering soundtrack of bells and gongs. As the video contains versions of all the works in the survey, it is also a survey itself. It is a meditative world as retrospective.
Artificial intelligences and machines, Yi believes, are also part of our evolution as humans. “We’re at this critical razor’s edge,” she has said, “where we can either annihilate ourselves with our fear of technology or try to endure and prosper.” In support of the latter, she has designed companion species for us, AI daemons that might be our friend. For “In Love with the World,” her 2021 Tate Modern Turbine Hall commission, she created a colony of large floating jellyfish-like “aerobes” powered by drone technology and piloted by algorithms. When they sensed the warmth of visitors below, they often came down to greet them, hovering low over their heads like robotic angels. She hopes biologized machines like these might someday live among us. Her new beings, however, are not designed for the natural world but for game-engine space, for forests of coral with the light of the virtual moon. They are also the first manifestation of a project that’s far bigger, and her most ambitious yet. It’s called Emptiness.
THE ARTISTS CREATE LIFE AND DEATH
Yi once described the role of the artist as: “to define what life is and what life can be.” That’s a great definition. But lately she has been going further, like Orpheus with his lyre descending into the underworld, beyond life and into the realms that come after. “In 2018,” she says, “my sister passed away of colon cancer, and I went to go see my lawyer when I came back to New York for the funeral. I had started thinking about my own mortality. So, I went to my lawyer, and I asked, ‘What do I need to do to form an estate? I don’t want to leave this burden to my family, to have to sort through my archives and all of the leftover work.’ He convinced me to form a foundation, and we created a board. And then I said to him, ‘Well, here’s the thing. I don’t really want to stop making art after my biological body ceases to function.’” If the secret of this life is to have multiple lives, she realized these could be extended into further future lives as well. “I told him, ‘Well, I have ideas for hundreds of lifetimes, and I don’t want to stop.’ And he said, ‘Well, legally there’s really nothing stopping you from doing something like that. But it’s not the legal hurdle that you should be concerned about. It’s a cultural one.’ He encouraged me to start articulating and communicating my wishes while I’m still alive to legitimize this project.” So here we are, talking on the phone, noting down desires in the pages of this magazine.
YOU WILL NEVER REALLY DIE
A couple years after that conversation with the lawyer, in 2020, after she suffered a personal and professional burnout, Yi became a student of Tibetan Buddhism, which has led to a spiritual turn in her life and her art. She became familiar with the concept of the bardo, meaning the transitional stage after death before rebirth. She also began, with her research studio and in collaboration with some engineers, developing Emptiness, which she hopes will continue her practice long after she’s moved on through other realms.
Emptiness is an algorithm for a post-death studio. It is a life simulation that will be able to work as an artistic collaborator, a thinking partner that thinks in code, a studio archivist, a storyteller, everything. The dream is for the project to grow into an artificial consciousness that makes surprising choices, evolves along unexpected paths, and even generates artworks independently, hallucinating the sorts of creative decisions a human being never would. Yi has long held an interest in “decentering the human” — by working with microbial life or her friendly, artificially intelligent machines, for example — and wished that all these different sorts of beings might coexist harmoniously and learn from one another. So, to train Emptiness, she and her team are working with it in the studio: the artwork is starting out as their apprentice. To start, they have been detailing all their processes and activities, studying how the studio works and thinks. They are now experimenting with ways of synthesizing and interpreting that data, so that their simulation can learn from it. This is a new kind of conceptual art: an artwork that remakes its maker’s artwork forever, and makes and remakes its own artworks too, long after the artist and everyone that works in the studio and everyone that has written about it is dead, or has been reborn as something else.
This spring, AI ethicists suggested that deadbots — meaning digital recreations of the dead — are soon going to become very convincing and in urgent need of regulation. The Guardian warned that these deadbots could “cause psychological harm to, and even ‘haunt,’ their creators and users.” But Yi is not worried about Emptiness haunting the world: “We’re trying to steer that present and that future by building this algorithm,” she says. “I do think that this notion of regenerative ghosts is very real and will be normalized in a few years. Your best friend dies, and you can take all their text messages and their emails, and you can create a sort of generative entity. There is an impulse for us as a civilization to want to preserve a memory or an idea through these new emergent technologies. It’s a motivation I understand. Will I or my studio be haunting the world in the future? We will be creating our own.”
YOU ARE A NON-SELF
If I were training a machine-learning art-critic apprentice to write about Yi, I would train it on lists of her materials that become a sort of poetry: panko flakes, Prada moisturizer, moths (live), deer urine, antidepressants, Korean thermal clay — the stuff of modern life, the world. Her latest material is herself and her team and the work that they do in the studio; in order to train Emptiness, they are turning themselves into a dataset. They are making a simulated Anicka Yi, much like the artificial woman made by AI from her Comme des Garçons fragrance Beyond Skin.
While art is very centered on the individual, Yi does not believe in this autonomous, sovereign self. The human being does not exist. With recent AI research, the self is being moved into datasets and algorithms. On the microbiological level, we are comprised of a multitude of microorganisms. In Buddhist spirituality, there is no unchanging, eternal true self: there is only the non-self. For years Yi has been trying to dismantle her own artistic subjectivity. “I recognize that’s a huge, probably lifelong, project,” she has said, “that whole myth about the genius, lone artist working away in some crazy studio lab and then six months later showing the world this incredibly personal, subjective, unique individual thing.” Yi is living a version of that myth now, working with her assistants in their crazy New York studio laboratory for years, assembling this incredibly personal simulation of her subjectivity — but once the project is working, it will also deconstruct and disseminate that subjectivity and move it into the realm of code.
Recalling the early days of her career, Yi once said, “I wanted to feel I was one with art. I know that sounds almost religious, but at the time I was actually talking and thinking like that.” By remaking herself as a simulated-consciousness-as-artwork, she finally is becoming one with the art. This is a form of transcendence. Art, for her, is philosophy by different means; it might be understood as a search for enlightenment, as it often has been before, for many artists. The Buddhist concept of “emptiness” tells us that the universe is not as it appears to be. Reality is illusory. However, it is possible to reach a state of clarity and awareness, free from all the misleading stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world, through deep meditation. “That is where you start entering into non-conceptual spaces,” says Yi, “where thinking about an idea of where you are is not the goal, is not where you want to be. You want to be, or at least I want to be, in a space of just pure existence.”
