There is something relatively ordinary about the imagings in Jao San Pedro's "Willing the Sun to Rise Twice". It’s made up of mostly male faces framed in small squares, either in a disintegrating haze or unrecognizable mush. Then there are her larger works, two screens in portrait, one, still with visible faces in what seems like a never-ending loop of motion, congealing and disintegrating (to suddenly think of a cow ruminating), and another, which if one chooses to stay put and make out what they can is something that, in a matter of seconds, appears figurative turning to abstract mass and back, situated within the noise of a sharp laboring erratic drone.
That is because it is that very noise that creates the figurative-mass loop, that further into a staring contest shapes and un-shapes itself into a thing, or some-thing. Jao calls these two moving imagings onscreen “portals”, Portal 1 and Portal 2. And like the face pulps of about a hundred variating pasty looking Caucasian dudes printed in black and white-to gray on Hahnemüle (to suddenly think of clay), cased in uniform blocks and then arranged along the stretch of the wall like overblown scattered pixels, they were all generated through artificial intelligence softwares. Jao fed instructions to a fast-thinking program that actually responds through artificial synapse to create what she desired creating, and in the process abandoning image, and so image-making, approaching the act – say through drawing or capturing – through these forms of imaging instead.
So, it is difficult to call these imagings abstract. Whereas blotches of paint accumulating through active force and actual color manipulation can make non-figurative images, imaging runs through a code, or a set of data; then this data elaborates what we optically detect as “image” – it is still image because we can see it, we can categorize it as something we perceive – but it is something made up entirely of something else. Imaging is now what stands as proxy to another abstract process we understand as imagination; or imaging is something that stands-in for what we perceive as the image. Imaging in turn calcifies imagination through AI generation and manipulation in that when we grasp this process of imagining in terms of biochemistry, we also subject it to a form of causality (do dreams make sense because we think we perceive it?). While for now imagination can still run amok as AI generative imaging tries to grapple how many set of fingers the figure of a human hand has, imaging delimits imagination’s scope.
It is this delimitation then that conceives what in Jao’s symmetric flow chart – an analogue guide through her exhibition which, in this context, is extraordinary for it is inscribed on paper – the trope of loss. It is now common knowledge that when something is rendered through the digital, this rendering turns the information, an image or a sound, into data, and through this rendition loses some bits of data diminishing some of its qualities (for example in audio its fidelity). How do machinic rendition qualify loss? And by loss, as I hold Jao’s paper flow chart, I mean, an understanding of what cuts across the phenomenon or experience of it? Grief, lamentation, release? In Jao’s earlier iteration of the use of AI imaging generation, what seemed to lapse into a self-obsessed reconfiguration of her own face only tended towards useless accumulation (something that could be a riddle by now, like how many selfies does an ape take in a day, and the answer is one, for it is the self-same answering machine), these imagings that seem frozen in their repetition because of their indistinct pallor suddenly stands in direct opposition, or maybe a not so blatant contrast, to the one that orchestrates, that feeds the sleepless machine information. These imagings suddenly betray their role as proxies, not only for a certain loss but a multitude of loss Jao wants to portray – it is loss itself.
What rounds out these imagings as now objects as perhaps loss itself, something Jao sculpted like digital clay is a literal reverb – for AI generation also works as a kind of feedback loop utilizing data. If these imagings, at the onset of looking vacillate between stand-in and the thing itself, it is an audio loop, also fed through an AI program until it exhausted all its semantic fingerprints, reverberating through the long exhibition hall that in the moment of being there is what informs the one in experience that you are in Jao’s consciousness as she processes loss. She told me it was the last voice message of a former lover; then she told me she also needed to get her ex-lover’s written consent that she can use his voice, as mandated by the software she used. This is comforting; for while there is a reveling in the risks and possibilities AI generation pose in relation to inhabiting and perceiving our exigent world as it becomes more “aware”, there is still this insistent, almost nagging interruption of the conscious organic, our human made-up rules and stuff – this exhibit guide on paper I hold, this reasonable agency, perhaps.
Jao and I got stuck at the gallery for a bit because of the pouring rain; it was the forecasted typhoon dissipating. Grab drivers kept cancelling on us, or Jao kept cancelling, so she got locked out of the app. It was funny. Then we hitched a ride to a nearby hotel along the way to Jao’s place where we had dinner in the hotel’s Japanese restaurant that has these private rooms. I sent B. a picture and said, “Suddenly, we’re in Japan.” We ate and chatted some more, Jao telling me the story of how she go into visual arts, her plans of going to Amsterdam, her impeccable closet of tailored suits, the lusciousness of period pieces, and if I’ll ever get to see her in boots. After dinner, the doors confused us, and we felt the whole restaurant amused. Going down the stairs, Jao told me nobody knew that restaurant was there, it’s like an American Horror Story situation, and then she said, sometimes I feel this place isn’t really here, then I thought, like a ghost place.
We stopped by the lobby mirror and took a picture. At the front of the building, we waited for her Grab to arrive which I booked. The rain has stopped, the traffic was clear. We suddenly noticed that there was a group of Japanese behind us that slowly grew in numbers, flanking us, chatting and laughing among themselves. So bizarre, I whispered to Jao, what an image that must’ve been if it were captured, but I capture it now, here in words: me in my crimson dress, Jao in her deconstructed tailored suit, suddenly surrounded by Japanese businessmen on a cool Makati night.
Before we parted, she handed me a face mask because I got worried I wouldn’t be allowed to ride Angkas without it. We hugged each other tight, for in loss, I suppose, there is also and always, us that remains, each other. I took the train instead, and on the train, as if in a footnote, I thought, that could be one of the last remaining striking function of art, to see and take note of the world in contrast. However the colder our tools become, we get warmer.
"Willing the Sun to Rise Twice" runs May 11-June 22, 2023 at Tarzeer Pictures, Chino Roces Ave., Makati
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