Rebeca Romero, Maria Joranko: Oracles and Algorithms

About

Both Romero and Joranko reconfigure historical objects from non-western civilisations. Their works draw attention to the artifice of knowledge-construction, specifically that of the fabrication of historical narratives by self serving empires. They infiltrate and subvert those long-held narratives, yet do not seek to repeat those mistakes by imposing a strict alternative. Rather, their artworks urge us to remain open to hearing the myriad voices and processes of knowledge-creation, and to accept the scepticism that all ‘knowledge’ may simply be a form of superstition. 

Peruvian born, Romero’s practice explores the connections between technology and an often imposed Western vision of history. Through a range of media, including sculpture, textiles, AI image manipulation, 3D printing and video, she considers diasporic identity, truth, fiction, and their relationship to the digital age.

Using 3D scans of artefacts from the Chavin civilisation – a pre-Inca culture which flourished from 900 to 200 BCE –  Romero raises questions about the production and exchange of knowledge, by combining  pre-Columbian objects  with new technologies of information-production: 3D printing and neural networks. Reshaped and reborn, these objects have travelled through time and space, past and future, life and death, reality and dream. The result is an array of uncanny artefacts; an alternative view of History and further, an alternative future whereby technologies and the information produced aren’t Euro-centric, but more inclusive of, and therefore true to, the worlds’ plethora of culture’s and stories.
Romero’s altered artefacts draw our attention to the mysterious processes by which societies can come to accept certain ideas taking them for granted. The Chavin were governed by priests not kings, and the consumption of the San Pedro cactus was a fundamental part of their rituals. It is believed that hallucinogenic experiences occurring during rituals played an important role in the development of the first civilizations of the Americas. Creating her video-installation, Romero fed the AI with textual descriptions of ancient artefacts taken from museum labels. Interpreting the relationship between word and image, the AI turned these descriptions into images. The resulting video is a vortex of Machine Learning generated images based on the narratives told by western powers. The effect is hallucinatory and prompts the viewer to question the legitimacy of those texts and the society which wrote them.

Romero’s use of AI image generators draws attention to the fact that AI-produced results are increasingly arising from algorithmic occurrences, processes which the onlooking humans cannot completely understand or unpick. There is an undeniable mysticism to these computational neural networks, offering answers but no explanations. More dangerously, we accept those answers: “... for the most part, we don’t care—so long as the algorithm performs well on the test set. We consult neural networks like the ancients consulted oracles.” [1]
Not only does this draw a parallel between the mysticism of knowledge-formation by the Chavin and today’s computer scientists, but this is also analogous to the ways in which certain narratives can all too easily become accepted if they are not questioned, leading to the oppression and forgetting of others.

Romero’s Early Horizon materialises this mysticism of knowledge-formation and acceptance. She prompted a neural network with the existential question “imagine the cosmos, imagine how the ancients understood their place in the world”, laser engraving the AI’s image responses onto a metal plaque. The result is a future artefact that embodies our own anxieties about what we can and cannot know – the image of the cosmos, the largest and most humbling question there is – and furthermore reminds us that different forms of intelligence and different cultures have unique visions of that answer.

Like Romero, Maria Joranko, explores in her own terms the mysticism of knowledge-creation and the potentials for making a new future based on the inclusion of narratives from more eras and cultures. Latinx/American artist, Joranko creates artworks examining our connection to ourselves and our heritage. Her works – made from oxides, clay, hair, rose leaves and petals, pampas grass, and 3D printing – aim to create a performative space in which we are re-energised by a newly found connection to our history and selves, and to the true container of all consciousness: Earth. 

Joranko's interest in the Earth is informed by her reconnection with her Latin/American ancestors’ heritage and research into plants and decolonial land practices. In these, the natural world and items sourced organic material are valued as equal holders of knowledge. Thus, her work is imbued with an anthropomorphic quality: the artificial and the natural overlap to create uncannily live objects. Her weapons – spears and blades – are made from modern technologies and the Earth: 3D printing encrusted in soil, plants and natural matter. These weapons are reminiscent of ceremonial and totemic artefacts from Latin cultures, yet are made with 3D printing based on Bronze Age artefacts, they mutate into relics from the future that we are trying to understand today. Coated in loam, they are rooted in love and suggest a portal to a different future that is more connected to that from which they are made, and more respectful of it and those who dwell there regardless of species, race, gender, sexuality, or culture. 
Through the adornments of hair and jewels, Joranko’s blades gain unique personalities, becoming alive as we interact with them in the space, and turn into guides for our approach to, and treatment of others’ perspectives and stories, be they fellow people or non-human entities.

This idea that knowledge can be stored in, and articulated by, the non-human is reinforced by Joranko’s series of steles, inscribed 3D printed ceramic slabs.
Whilst her weapons appear to us as objects-out-of-time carrying their stories to us, these stele are premonitory reminders that we will leave artefacts about our civilisation; stories encoded in objects. Joranko takes up this artform from the past – stone monuments whose meanings varied – and injects the present moment into it via a 3D printed relief model image of herself. There is a forward momentum to these stele: coming from the past to now; coming from now, embossed with Joranko’s image, into the future. Like their form, the material composition of these stele speaks of knowledge-survival through the interaction of cultures’ differences. Superficially appearing of clay (an ancient form of art and technology) they are at their core 3D printed.

Their clay surfaces, alchemically embellished with fired oxides, encourage humility from the viewer. We are prompted to remember and thank those past civilisations upon whose technological developments ours stand today: the clay exterior literally and figuratively encases and protects the modern technology. Knowledge systems do not exist in a vacuum, nor do they overwrite another – as western knowledge-systems and narratives present it. Rather, past cultures’ technologies are embroiled within all that remains today and all that will remain into the future. These stele are offerings to those past civilisations in memory of them. They are also offerings to ourselves at present, as images of possible future artefacts we could leave if we become a civilisation more open to alternative knowledge-systems and the exchange of narratives.

[1]  The Other Side: Algorithm as Ritual in Artificial Intelligence, Browne, Swift, April 2018