Bianco Valente: amid intelligent machines, paradoxes, futuristic scenarios and the mystery of that forge of still-unsolved cryptographies called the brain, with its faded images resting on structures of an inescapable logic. Electronic art? No.
Too limiting. The two artists are interested in the boundary line that separates the living from its artificial re-proposal, in life in its intricate relationships, the ones that have for some time now been arousing the interest of the entire scientific community; we're talking about complex dynamics, vital logics that art too seems to be questioning.
Video and digital images composing diluted renderings of a perception of the world that is taking shape through complex biochemical processes, fast currents and synaptic flashes (Mind Landscape, Untitled).
Two Turing machines conversing with one another, a ping-pong of the limits and possibilities of artificial intelligences: a perverse game (Killing Time).
Unicellular beings, fighting for survival, evolve while swimming among bits and computer code (Alife). Billions of structured and organised cells, cortical perception, hallucinated images, chemical drugs (JSR). A cerebral cartography like a star map (Relational Domain). Some "frames" from the research of the two Neapolitan artists.
Let's go deeper. Bianco-Valente. We interviewed them.

Teresa De Feo
Let's start with your latest installation, Relational Domain, presented at the V.M.21 gallery in Rome.
Like many of your works, it plays on the representation of the invisible cerebral processes that underlie the mediating work that allows us to relate to the world, to picture it. This work of figuration seems inseparable from our imaginative baggage made of memories, past experiences, unconscious reworking and editing, which always seems to interfere with the possibility of an objective representation of reality, which is evidently impossible.
With this installation, it seems to me that this attention to brain processes, synaptic connections, biochemical mechanisms tied to perceptual and memory dynamics, which has always characterised your work, detaches itself from the final result, a mental image, and instead wants to translate into image the very functioning of the brain: its pathways, its process maps.
Is this a kind of reversal? Highlighting the process rather than the final result?

Bianco-Valente
Over the years, the frame of reference of the research we're pursuing has broadened; whereas before our attention was obsessively focused on brain processes and on the attempt to represent mental images, now many other factors have come into play to stimulate our work: the paradoxes and the astonishment that will soon be sparked, for instance, by the first tentative interactions between artificial intelligent entities and human beings, but also the fact that science, to this day, is in fact unable to describe or predict the dynamics present in nature in a plausible way.
The method used is to break a large, complex problem down into many small, more manageable problems, in the hope of then being able to put the pieces of the puzzle back together to get the solution to the whole. But things aren't quite like that, and Relational Domain, besides representing a kind of slow navigation through a three-dimensional mental map, as it happens also represents complex natural dynamics, where every element is linked to all the others through a very dense connective network, and where the smallest change causes, through a mechanism of cause and effect, a more or less significant change in the whole structure. What exists is in constant flux, and so its representation cannot but be dynamic. This can be true for the representation of reality that we keep alive in the brain and that helps us interact with it, but it also holds for representing a plausible model of natural dynamics.


T.D.F
Playing on the relationship between visible and invisible (I'm thinking of Jsr), and in particular on the possibility of using images to highlight processes such as organic mechanisms otherwise hidden from view. Is this what art is? Allowing the visibility of the invisible? Must the artist reveal?

B-V
A work of art must essentially evoke emotions, otherwise it risks becoming a cold intellectual game, an end in itself. Essays exist to communicate opinions, fiction exists for stories; art is essentially an emotional exchange, and good art must have the quality of being as universal as possible, allowing this exchange even between minds that don't have much in common with each other. If you need to study in order to feel something, you're probably looking at an overwrought or perverse game.
It sounds strange coming from us, but our constant effort is to always keep this first level of reading present in every work.


T.D.F
In some interviews you have often stressed that you use technology only as a tool, that you aren't seduced by it. But I wonder how much technology has actually influenced your research, given that questions about the limits and possibilities of the technological tool often emerge in your work, I'm thinking of pieces like Killing Time and Breathless. In short, how much does the technological tool shape the research of artists who don't like to call themselves digital artists?

B-V
If for "Breathless" the discussion really centred on the machine understood in a physical sense and on its ability to produce, in real time, a plausible voice, for "Killing Time" instead it centres on the supposed intelligence of the two machines involved in the work.
As far as we're concerned, these machines could just as well be built out of rolls of toilet paper, since the underlying idea of the work wouldn't change one bit. The truth of the matter is that what fascinates us is not so much the machine itself as its as-yet-unexpressed potential.
With the right software, even the computers that today print receipts in doctors' offices could unsettle us with their pseudo-intelligent behaviour and trigger unanswerable paradoxes. This is the real fascination of dormant, idle machines.


T.D.F
Still on the subject of tools and digital language, you have often stated that you love video, and digital video in particular, because you found very strong similarities between the electronic image and the mental image (your area of interest), both not very high in resolution and tending to be volatile, both the product of a code. Similarly, you have said you're especially interested in "soft mechanisms", in everything that is "software", from the machine's processes to the content of our minds. All this seems to hint at a kind of impatience with hardware, with the physical support, with the body or matter as a limit. Is matter, the body, hardware really a limit for Bianco-Valente, something limiting? Are we heading towards dematerialisation?
And if so, is it a process you find desirable?

B-V
The body is a wonderful thing; the whole pleasure of living is essentially tied to it. Things like sex and food, for example, wouldn't hold much appeal for entirely dematerialised entities, but the body conceals a snag: like all unstable balances, it is destined to end, taking with it all the emotions lived and imagined, the dreams and the intuitions. In that sense, being able to detach the mind from the body wouldn't be a bad thing, but it's a controversial subject and the time is probably not yet ripe.


T.D.F.
In fact, in your work Minimum Unit of Meaning, foreseeing the imminent arrival of intelligent machines, you have, so to speak, "backed up" your memory, transcribing experiences, memories, images onto a thin sheet of tissue paper 3.5 km long (as of today!) in order to provide cognitive material for these futuristic artificial creatures. Handing down one's own memory to a machine, a path towards immortality?
Do you believe it will one day be possible to entrust a machine with our "soft baggage" so as to continue existing "as immaterial conscious entities"? And if so, is that desirable?

B-V
The problem with artificial intelligent entities, which will be switched on before long, is precisely that of having a cognition (even if only in broad strokes) of the world in which they'll be called upon to interact. It would take years to allow each of these machines to develop its own experience directly, and so we thought that describing on a paper ribbon the main experiences that shaped our personal growth would certainly help in this sense, at least as a good starting point.
Obviously, this work too is a paradox, a provocation. The type of paper we chose is so fragile that there's no guarantee it will outlive us, but even so, seeing three and a half kilometres of our reflections, memories and experiences piled up on the floor is truly striking, and immediately gives the idea of standing before the complex network of information chaotically piled up in the brain.


T.D.F.
Your interest, beyond turning towards the mechanisms of brain function tied to perception and memory - which ultimately comes down to the unsolved problem of "consciousness", and consequently to the research opened up in this direction by artificial intelligence - also turns towards the complex dynamics of new studies on artificial life. In both cases, obviously, we're talking about complex systems, with their recognisable traits of adaptivity, self-organisation, emergence. We can hardly avoid mentioning the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. For the Alife project you mentioned a collaboration with some researchers from this forge of great minds and ideas. Would you like to talk about it?

B-V
We first read about this institute in the book "Complexity" by M. Waldrop, which traced its history from its founding and devoted many pages to the biographies of the main figures behind its activities.
Among other things, we were immediately struck by the research into software simulators capable of predicting evolutionary emergences in a natural environment, similar to what could be found on Earth at the time of the first life forms that inhabited it.
The early versions of these simulators were very bare-bones graphically, since they were designed essentially to provide numerical data on emerging trends.
Some time later, we were commissioned to create a permanent installation in a metro station, and we immediately imagined using one of these simulators, with its graphics modified, to render the evolutionary dynamics not in numerical terms but in images, as if one were really observing the simulated environment. We contacted some young researchers at the institute, who responded enthusiastically and were ready to start this collaboration.


T.D.F.
Let's talk about Alife, then. A project commissioned by Ansaldo Trasporti Sistemi Ferroviari for the De Ferrari station of the Genoa metro. It's an artificial life simulation projected in real time within the station's spaces, one that will go on forever. The simple, initial "unicellular" beings will, over the years, reproduce and evolve into different aggregate structures of ever-increasing complexity, in a slow but continuous random evolution.
Your interest and contribution, as you've stated, concern the way the evolutionary scenario in which these small living beings interact will be represented, and the possibility for people passing through the station to follow this growth and use it as an indicator of their own personal evolution.
A corner of life teeming behind a public space of distracted, busy activity. Going mad, dominating, freeing oneself from the physical support, developing consciousness.
Do you believe in the future possibility of machines or artificial entities evolved to the point of generating a "consciousness"?

B-V
Here we finally are, at the crux of it! Since researchers studying the brain still don't agree on the organic origin of abstract concepts such as consciousness, memory, desire, how could we ever tell whether a machine deemed intelligent because of its capabilities will see these human traits emerge autonomously "within itself"?


T.D.F.
Staying with the new epistemology of complexity, and with regard to the climate of dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration it has generated, do you think the artist can enter this debate as a full participant and, moreover, make a significant contribution within this multifaceted field of research? If so, how?

B-V
We're quite happy not to have any obligation to scientifically prove our theories, and that the works we create can stop at the level of provocation or paradox.
On the other hand, many of the scientists pursuing this kind of research must have the sensitivity and the ability to question themselves anew at every step, a trait typical of artists. We can therefore consider them artists themselves, even though they express themselves in different languages and in a world parallel to (but not alternative to) that of the visual arts.


T.D.F.
To conclude, among your points of reference you've mentioned the wonderful essay by Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene", according to which genes found in the replication of their own code a kind of immortality, and so the ever more complex evolution of living organisms would be a way through which they ensured their survival. In an interview, on this subject, you mentioned a reversal of this trend through the dynamics of genetic manipulation. In what sense?

B-V
The conclusion Dawkins reaches in his book is that, for millions of years, genes have made use of the entire range of living forms present on Earth in order to pursue their goal: duplicating their own code, generation after generation, towards immortality.
As time went on, the complexity of living beings (carriers of the genetic information to be duplicated) gradually increased, until it reached, in one of its many facets, human beings, who, thanks to their brain and the tools they have been able to develop alongside it, are now able to understand and manipulate the evolutionary dynamics tied to the genetic code.
It's as if, in a continuous game of one-upmanship, the genes had let the matter slip out of their hands. Now it will be humans who manage the genes, and no longer the other way around. With all the positive and negative implications that this entails.


T.D.F.
Apocalyptic or integrated with respect to the new frontiers of genetic engineering, a subject made even more topical by the controversies stirred up by the last referendum?
How do Bianco and Valente position themselves in the face of these issues of great ethical responsibility?

B-V
Our good fortune is that there are, in the world, nations entirely free from the dogmatic constraints tied to various religious creeds. It will probably be in China or in Singapore that all the positive aspects tied to this kind of research will come to light. Time has shown us that it certainly won't be a chemical-based medicine that manages to stop cancer. For this kind of disease, as for many others that still besiege us, the only valid answer is genetics.

_
Taken from digicult.it, September 2005

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