Miguel Soares graduated in photography and equipment design in 1995 at the faculty of fine arts in Lisbon. At the end of the 1990s, while some feared the millennium bug and when the use of video was getting accessible to more people and especially to young artists, Soares began to use 3D rendering softwares that allow him to build his own exclusive virtual environments and to animate it. At this time computer-made animation was extremely hard due to the limited capacities of the hardware, but now this technology is capable of results beyond our imagination. For Soares, music video is the ideal form to display his images and his animations are often, as in LUZAZUL, accompanied by his own electronic music compositions. Miguel Soares’ reflection concentrates on the real versus the virtual world and his artistic production is deeply inspired by the various possibilities regarding the future of humanity, from popular sci-fi culture to the most obscure sect beliefs.
For this exhibition the artist focuses on technological singularity, a theory defended by, among others, Ray Kurzweil who is the actual director of engineering at Google. According to this theory, the invention of an artificial intelligence (AI) capable of upgrading itself or to create another more intelligent AI would lead to a certain explosion of intelligence. Machines would become super-intelligences able to progress at a speed incomprehensible for the human brain. Technological singularity would definitely change human life in unpredictable ways and redefine the role of humanity on earth. This theory raises strongly animated debates, as much about its plausibility as about if it could save or end humanity.
Miguel Soares chose to cross the idea of technological singularity with the Three ages of Man, a prophecy written 800 years ago by Joachim of Fiore. According to The XIIth century theologian, history is patterned on the Christian doctrine of Trinity and is divided into three epochs : the age of the father characterised by obedience to the rules of God, the age of the son with Man as the son of God and the age of the holy spirit when mankind, by coming in direct contact with God, reaches total freedom and universal love. The creation of a superior AI could be the key for humans to access god level and the final age of the holy spirit.
The exhibition is divided into three parts (a 5 screens video installation and two projected videos), the three ages of a human-shaped headless robot created by the artist. Through the first rooms we watch it being assembled in an automatic factory, as a commodity. Then it’s living a lonely and meaningless urban life (working on a laptop, taking public transportation etc…), probably what he was designed for.
The title of the exhibition LUZAZUL is an assemblage of the Portuguese words for light (luz) and blue (azul), it refers to the blue light produced by the screens we now use on a daily basis. Only a few humans remain in the artist’s proposition and most of them are wearing blue luminescent goggles. While the robot works, survivors are depicted in complete inactivity, they don’t work and they don’t talk either. Reduced to bodies wandering in the urban space, their souls seem to be trapped in the void of the mysterious masks, in a parallel virtual space. At MNAC, visitors can recognise this cold, blue light which fills the galleries like fog and emanates from the screens as well as from the 13 light-boxes containing printed stills from the videos. As there is no text or on the walls and a minimal amount of furniture in the rooms, this particular light as well as the original music composed for the videos turn into guides for the visitors through this closed circuit exhibition that can be visited in both ways.
In the second part of the exhibition the robot comes to learn, slowly (by observing a donut found on the ground or by reading the book Frankenstein, for example), about himself and his environment. Later he will assemble his own robots from spare parts (for example a used washing machine) found in his garage. Knowledge will lead the robots to protest for their rights so they design posters and go down to the streets to protest, as humans did years before. In the third and last part, after becoming fully aware of themselves, the robots find a way to extract, without any effort, an enigmatic mirror matter from humans’ cars. Then the extracted matter (which seems to have its own intelligence) flies away and transforms itself into donut-shaped, closed and autonomous cities, floating in the sky and away from humans.
The word LUZAZUL is a palindrome, wether it is read from left to right or from right to left it keeps the same order of letters, as if there was a mirror placed at the middle of the word. Mirrors, as well as the donut shape which is very present in the exhibition, refer to a round trip movement. The movement of a total revolution in which humans reached contact with god by creating a superior intelligence, freeing themselves from any duty, a movement maintained by the AI which comes to the same end by the same ways, placing humanity more and more aside.
As it is still a rare opportunity, it is a real pleasure to watch 3D rendered images displayed in a major art institution. Especially when these are addressing a debate as important and exciting as our near future and, in this case the controversial theory of technological singularity. Miguel Soares allows the visitors of MNAC to discover a big issue of our time that deserves more interest from the public and his choice to produce computer made content in order to express about this subject is coherent.
In the official text written by the curator, the world depicted in the LUZAZUL videos is presented as a « non-dystopian future ». It is non-dystopian in a sense that human activities (for example reading, building things or protesting) are perpetuated in a way that is similar to the way it is today. But these remains of humanity are then reserved to robots while humans are cut from their natural environment, stuck in a virtual space hidden behind glasses.
Miguel Soares’ anticipation is loyal to the theories from which he chose to draw inspiration as these theories have been presented by their writers and advocates, he translates them through his 3D images in a simple, almost naïve, narration. This exhibition shows only one side of technological singularity, it doesn’t take into account the unpredictable aspect of an event whose forms and consequences are way beyond what can be imagined and it keeps aside the fundamental human needs that should be served in priority by intelligence. As if, by hiding this side of the issue, he chose to give it back to his visitors’ own reflexion.
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