Hypercomplex II
- September 02, 2023 - September 23, 2023
Wataru Sakuma presents an additional cohort of hypercomplex objects to Modeka Art. Like Hypercomplex I, all the works here went through the same process of multiple interventions, interweaving several technologies together — medical diagnostic, digital and Artificial Intelligence — all culminating into the final destination that is manual human labor. It is as if at the pinnacle of the whole experience is the persistence of the will of the human hand to inscribe itself in the materiality of all these hypercomplex objects through the final act of manually weaving several versions of images. This final step in Hypercomplex I seems to be parallel to a low-tech self-correcting intervention suggested by Yuval Noah Harari as a way to regulate the risks of AI.
But aside from the cunning inscription of the human hand in the materiality of these objects, there is something more conspicuous in this follow up effort. It looks like, as if, as Sakuma confronts his own anxiety as an artist versus the meteoric explosion of the creative capacity of Artificial Intelligence, the tendency to anthropomorphize these objects comes out more intensely. Can it be possible that the post human phase only intensify our own desire to be more human like a catch 22 absurd pursuit?
In Hypercomplex II, centralized at the field of vision, are the gallbladder stones extracted from Sakuma himself. His surgery 2 years ago coincides with the opening date of this exhibition, serendipitously. Somehow, the pursuit to creatively engage AI happens symmetrically with the experiential encounter he had with pain and his concern for healing after his biological procedure. The biological and the artificial, the organic and the inorganic pairing comes as a symmetrical bonding. A new definition for living. And as a kind of a post script, Sakuma again, recruits the hands of his 2 sons in place of the AI intervention phase to do their own versions of hypercomplex objects.
[Text by Jose Jay B. Cruz]