c blog

On March 22, 2012, I created Democratic Party. After a long eleven-year hibernation, I resurrected it yesterday after realizing the revolution of the so-called AIs (artificial intelligence) and AGI (Artificial general intelligence) and the change that will soon sweep over the human societies as we know them today.

In 1998 I imagined what would become, seven years later, Google Maps. This imagination turned into a project called Portugal Digital, presented at the Pavilhão do Território at EXPO ’98. But unfortunately, the teams that developed and programmed my intuition sold their souls to some local devils of technological speculation instead of continuing to work with me. Such arrogance prevented the Google Maps algorithm from being developed before 2006 and, probably, in my country. Nevertheless, it would have been EXPO ’98’s most outstanding contribution to the country’s technological development.

Later, in 2005/2006, I imagined creating a utopic art technology town called Virtual Museum Park (Parque Museu Virtual). It would have been born in the small Portuguese city Montemor-o-Novo. The local government welcome the project, even assigning Herdade da Adua as a place for its future implantation. And I envisioned something else in 2012: Democracy Maps. The idea here was to use geographically referenced databases to build from their dynamic potential the foundational matrix of a kind of global democracy not imposed on the tip of any bayonet. Some diagrams I draw for this project deserve a review, particularly in light of the emergence of blockchains, OpenAI and DALL.E.

What does this have to do with art? First, I would say that reading authors like Claude Lévi-Strauss, André Leroi-Gourhan, Jean-François Lyotard, John Dewey, Alfred Gell, or Immanuel Kant, and keeping in mind the impact that artists like Kasimir Malévitch, Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp or John Cage continue to have in the continuity of the arts, everything! Secondly, difficulties at the core of AI lie in the very nature of human flesh, our brains, and all our sensors: skin, eyes, ears and how we have developed our language system.

Originally published at lab-D