The Fifth Wall. Rachel Nagelberg
German artist, Gregor Schneider, recently released an ad for a volunteer to spend his or her last living days in a museum space. He wants to sequester a dying individual in the confines of four white public walls and display his or her last moments to all. In an interview he said that he wanted to display a person dying naturally, in peace. That he didn’t understand why death couldn’t be a positive experience, why it’s such a complication to portray the beauty of death, to create human places for the dying and dead. People send him death threats.
There’s a three-second segment in a home video I salvaged in which my mother says something to the camera that I can’t quite make out. I’ve replayed it a countless number of times, to the point of an obsession I’m not quite yet readily able to admit. The film furrows and chafes; black and white lines zigzag along the cascading color image, light and dark grays forming up and down its quivering surface. From behind the camera, my dad asks her a question. He zooms in until her face fills the screen. My mother has one of those kinds of mouths that curl up to the side when she talks. She smiles and tilts her head a degree or two and says something to the camera and blinks. But her voice drowns out from the static on the tape.
It is a machine that walks, runs, climbs, and carries—a sleek, four-legged assemblage of algorithmic, interlocking parts. Headless and faceless, but with a computer as its brain. An engine as its spirit. Named the “Drog” by its creator in reference to its dog-like proportions and its drone-robotic technology, the machine is considered “intelligent,” can navigate a wide variety of terrains. There are sensors for locomotion, joint position, joint force. Planning, actuation, pose estimation, control. It has a GPS, stereo vision system, lidar, and gyrosope. Proprioception, exteroception, homeostasis. This is a machine that can see on its own.
“Four feet long, three feet high. This girl’s about the size of a Rottweiler.” The artist chats while an AV tech tries to get a sense of the Drog’s electronics to sync with the other pieces in SFMoMA’s new upcoming show, The Last Art. I stare at the artist while taking measurements for a custom barricade around the scary-looking thing for protection—whether for the Drog or for the public, I’m not exactly sure.
Behind the scenes, the museum is bustling with at least three times as many bodies due to the complex technological nature of the show. They brought their own exhibition and AV techs, plus thirteen different curators to work in tandem with our own curators, preparators, and electricians. We’ve begun to start referring to this setup as “the war room.”
“Its custom GPS allows for ‘human following’—you know, device drivers, data logging, visual odometry. We have sensors focusing directly on its internal state, monitoring the hydraulics, oil temp, battery charge, etcetera.” The artist is tall and lanky with dark inset eyes and pale, freckled skin. His nametag says Michael Landy. I can’t stop staring at his face. There’s something about him that looks just like Adam Black.
Michael Landy looks toward me, and I immediately resume focusing on my menial task at hand. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse the Drog in an uncanny seated position against the far wall, not yet activated. I feel the artist’s shadow approach me.
“Nice gloves,” he says, eyeing me.
I immediately look around me, my favorite gesture of pretending to be blind. “Who, me?”
He laughs. White gloves are mandatory for everyone in this room. He stands over me, silently.
“What’s … up?” I ask awkwardly. The AV tech rolls his eyes.
Michael Landy observes the chalked line I’ve been making around the Drog’s allotted roaming space. “You know in the labs we just let this baby run free.”
“Is that right?” I pretend to be busier than I am, studying the tape measure intensively and double-marking off lines. The resemblance to Adam is less in his face than his overall bone structure, his authoritative stance. The unadulterated, academic sureness.
“Yeah we have this little compound in L.A. We’re working on a whole Noah’s ark of machines that use drone technology to see, hear, and feel.”
“Will they all be headless?” I ask.
He laughs. “No, definitely not. This model is based on a military funded prototype invented a few years ago at MIT to take the place of humans in hazardous environments. But here we’ve stripped away the military context and are presenting the first introduction of this kind of automata into a gallery space. How do we look at this kind of technology as art? is the kind of question we’re after.”
“What does it mean to see without eyes?”
“Precisely,” he says, moving closer. A smirk forms on his lips. “Or—rather—what is a visionless gaze?”
The Last Art—a machine that sees for itself. What else could be left—a machine that dreams?
Michael Landy continues to observe me with a new interest I immediately recognize. My body starts to grow excited. I realize that right here, in this room, I’m holding all the power. The artists aren’t even allowed to touch their own work.
A timer goes off on my phone. In ten minutes there’s a mandatory team meeting about the museum’s acquisition of a multimillion-dollar Richard Serra sculpture—one of his infamous “torqued ellipses” entitled Band. It’s scheduled to open with The Last Art in three weeks. I begin to pack up my tools.
“I expect I’ll be running into you in the near future,” says Michael Landy, grinning, and walks back over to the AV tech handling his Drog.
I feel a slight shift of energy in the room, as if the world around me is rearranging. A hollowness forms inside of my body, but also a heightened sensation, a buzzing of attraction from the interest of this strange, yet uncannily familiar man.
I hadn’t seen Adam Black in over four years—and he was hardly on any social media. We met in my Introductory Film class freshman year, which he’d taught—a young PhD candidate in film studies, from whom I suffered years of romantic obsession after a drunken encounter at a party. I’d sent him a long, esoteric email during my first semester of grad school, which he never responded to. Our whole nonexistent relationship had from the beginning suffered from multiple bouts of intellectual intensity patterned with long absences of nothing—no communication—at all.
I’ve found that when you build up a fantasy, it tends to become stronger than the memory, strangling it to asphyxiation; it takes over the past. Adam Black: a figure ever since fixed indefinitely as the image of my absent lover.
On my way to the conference room, I stop to read a blurb about The Last Art tacked to a makeshift wall in the gallery:
THE LAST ART PRESENTS AN INTERACTIVE VENUE TO EXPERIENCE INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY AS WORKS OF CONTEMPORARY ART. WHAT IS THE DIRECTION THAT ART IS MOVING IN? WHAT KIND OF HISTORICAL PERIOD DO WE FIND OURSELVES IN, NOW THAT WE’VE HISTORICIZED EVERYTHING UP TO THE PRESENT MOMENT? WITH THE FLOODING ADVENT OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES THAT ALLOW USERS TO ARCHIVE LIFE AS IT’S HAPPENING, WE FIND THAT CONTEMPORARY ART IS BECOMING A WAY OF ARCHIVING THE PRESENT—THE IDEA THAT NOT ONLY CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS ARE ARCHIVISTS, BUT ALL WHO USE TECHNOLOGY, FOR WE ARE CONSTANTLY RECORDING LIFE AS IT IS HAPPENING. EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING LIVE. FROM HANDHELD RECORDING DEVICES AND GPS SYSTEMS TO VIRTUAL REALITY INTERFACES, SELF-DRIVING CARS, BIOTECHNOLOGICAL ANIMAL PROTEIN GROWTH, AND MECHANIZED ORGANS, WE HAVE ENTERED INTO A PERIOD WHERE WE NO LONGER NEED BODIES TO MOVE, OR EYES TO SEE. NOW THAT THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN ART, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY ARE BECOMING EVER-BLURRED IN THEIR ATTEMPTS TO IMAGINE NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR THE FUTURE, WHAT WILL THE ERA OF THE POSTHUMAN HAVE IN STORE FOR US, AND FOR ART? WHAT WILL THE ROLE OF ART TAKE ON?
Printed below is an image of a sheep as the show’s advertised icon. It refers to the sculpture Dolly, a life-size replica of the infamous first living clone, Dolly the Sheep. It’s by the same artist famous for crystallizing an inoperative missile from the Iraq War.
Several minutes are all that remain of man. The line comes back to me from a podcast I listened to on the bus over here—a former designer of nuclear