The sculptor, printmaker and longtime contributor to the JC art scene locates sacred reverberations in the heart of the mainframe.
Somewhere beyond the firmament, God is probably growing jealous of artificial intelligence. Not its omnipotence — so far, it hasn’t shown itself capable of much more than plagiarism — but by people’s unshakable belief in it. We’ll accept answers to questions without demanding citations from the database we’re consulting. We encourage it to write for us, calculate for us, and think for us. For no reason at all, we will believe that the oracle we’re consulting is impartial: a pool of accumulated human wisdom we can sip from, rather than dogma influenced, or straight-up supplied, by the high priests in the boardrooms of tech companies. Credulousness is the residue of blind worship, and lately, we’ve been kneeling before a digital altar with our eyes shut. Faith in magic isn’t waning. It’s moving online.
In our charitable moments, we’ve got a name for this creed: transhumanism. This is what we sometimes call the outsourcing of our basic faculties to machinery. It may seem ironic that one of the oldest artists in Jersey City is one of the most persistent investigators of the aesthetics of the transhuman, but really, it’s an indication of how long the fantasy of computer-enhanced existence has been around. Sculptor, printmaker, and experimentalist Pat Lay is fascinated by chips, wires, and circuit-boards, and her heady work crackles with digital mystery. She’s been a consistent observer of the strange similarities between digital design and ancient symbology.
“Hybrid,” a new show that makes the austere interior of the Lemmerman Gallery at NJCU (2039 Kennedy Blvd.) feel more than a bit like a mainframe, turns the machine inside out and exposes its guts. In so doing, Lay tells us something unnerving about how we’ve been wired, and re-wired, by the plugged-in world we’ve made. Our reliance on an invisible grid to guide us is the closest thing we’ve got to a 21st century popular religion, and thus it’s not too much of an exaggeration to call “Hybrid” an exhibition of religious art.
In “Hybrid,” Pat Lay even reimagines the soul as something that might be fused with (and transformed by) a physical motor. The artist affixes a piece of computer junk — an old fan, or a little turbine, or an array of plastic prongs — to a ball of clay about the size of a globe. Then she tints, shapes, and glazes the sculpture in a manner that makes it seem like the discarded computer part and the sculpted earth are indivisible. Cleverly, Lay allows the dimensions and visual attitude of the industrial waste to influence her design decisions for the color, angles, dimensions, and personality of the clay body of the piece. She calls these “soulbots,” and though we’re tempted to see the metal and plastic as the “bot” and the earth and minerals as the “soul,” it’s entirely possible that, for Lay, it’s the other way around.
Lay nests her soulbots all around the Lemmerman, where they sprout like gourds and squat like wintering waterfowl, and exude self-satisfaction and integrity. That which is immortal and transcendent, they seem to say, can no longer be separated from the manufactured environment. We’re part eternal organic being and part android, and it’s getting harder to tell which part is which.
This ambiguity continues with a pair of “Transhuman Personae” sculptures: clay busts of impassive bald-headed men sprouting wires and diodes from their faces as if they’re robotic chia pets. Lay has fashioned them with compartments in their crania and their cheeks, and stuffed them with cables and connections. These are golems as they might be fashioned by Radio Shack or Mikey’s Hookup, and as they stare at us with gears where their third eyes ought to be, they radiate a curious kind of contentment. They seem ready — for the future, or a fight, or for a hard drive crash. Their alacrity might be a matter of electricity and rubber, but it comes through powerfully, and it achieves the intensity most frequently seen in works of sacred art. Lay’s clay transhumans will probably remind you of Dr. Manhattan from the Watchmen and other laser-eyed sci-fi characters, but the frayed connections and chipboards that ring their necks also call back to North and Mesoamerican sculptures used in ritual practice, and the symmetry and self-possession suggest ancient depictions of Siddhartha Gautama. For these half-robots, maybe enlightenment is simply a matter of turning on the current.
Overtones of Buddhism are detectable in the two-dimensional work on display, too. Lay’s Kozo paper wall-hangings, some as big as altarpieces, are collages of images of computer parts and drives, doubled, mirrored, and saturated with color. The patterns are instantly recognizable as machine-derived, but they also hint of Himalayan sand-painted mandalas and Navajo blankets. This is the motherboard as iconostasis, and it does invite quiet reverence from the viewer. Lay has even given these pieces a handle that whispers of the temple: she calls them scrolls.
This is appropriate. Scrolls are handled and interpreted by priests, consulted only when necessary, and put away out of the reach of the parishioners once the liturgy is over. Most of us have no idea how the devices we rely on operate. Unless we’re electrical engineers, we’re absolutely mystified when we peek under the hood. Holy geometry is as good an explanation as any for the wizardry we encounter when we operate our computers. As Arthur C. Clarke — someone who surely would have enjoyed “Hybrid” — reminded us, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We reached that level of advancement long ago.
Yet innovation happens fast, and as it change happen, our ideas about transhumanism change, too. The funny thing about “Hybrid” is that the technology in the show already feels archaic. USB and printer connections are antiques in a wireless world; the flash drives that dangle from the heads of the busts are as anachronistic as a bone necklace. Many young people who are perpetually online will never see a chip. Cables have been cut, hardware has turned into vaporware, and interfaces have shrunk to the brink of invisibility. The wire as a metaphor for connectivity has given way, replaced by the five bars on the top corner of the phone, and the future transhuman subject, passively caught in the strands of an invisible web, will not resemble a cyborg. He’ll be indistinguishable from a man on the street in the age before computers. Only the structure of his consciousness will be different.
And even that is debatable. Technology has changed the speed of our communication and the tenor of our interactions. I am not sure it has laid a glove on the human soul. We're the same trouble that we’ve always been, and in pretty much the same way we've always been, no matter what gadgets we’re presently hooked on. Artificial intelligence has been advertised as transformative, and perhaps in its purest form it is; but the way we’ve been using it is as human as any other kind of piracy throughout history. Pat Lay is absolutely right to locate a spiritual dimension in our quest to be more than what we are, and to identify technology as the means by which optimists hope to get there. Her delightful little soulbots, smooth, balanced, and perfectly integrated, with no visible dissonance between the mechanical and the organic, are an expression of a real aspiration. Her hypnotic vision of sacred patterns in the microchips is a gesture of hope that the digital future into which we’re headed might be informed by the wisdom of old.
Perhaps it will be. Maybe there are enough traces of the holy in the body of our machines to make our new religion as spiritually satisfying as our old ones were. But this penitent wishes we had better gods to worship.
(“Hybrid” is on view at the Lemmerman Gallery on the third floor of Hepburn Hall, the prettiest building on the NJCU campus and the one you’re least likely to miss. The gallery is open to the public from noon until 5 p.m. every weekday. It’s a free show.)