Johnson, Rindon, artist. art

Rindon Johnson: Best Synthetic Answer.

[Place of publication not identified] : Rockbund Art Museum, 2024.

1 online resource

"Best Synthetic Answer is an experimental seven-month, ever-evolving exhibition project by American artist and poet Rindon Johnson. Emerging from a series of discussions between Johnson and RAM artistic director X Zhu-Nowell, the exhibition navigates the complex geographies of the Pacific, interrogating traditional notions of borders, fixed territory, states, and ecocide. The Pacific is full of commerce: its seafloor is divided up for mining, freight lanes crisscross its expanse, and commercial fishing extends across it. To maintain the current level of exploitation of the earth's resources, the Pacific is crucial to securing a capitalist future. Best Synthetic Answer attempts to answer the question: "How does a Black American, raised on the edge of the Pacific, move through the ocean to reach Shanghai? Apart from obvious forms of resource extraction as forms of exploitation, on what levels am I also responsible for this destruction? As a consuming human on this earth? As an American citizen? As a Black person? As my parents' only son? What seismic shifts will come from the collapse of so many ecosystems? Besides, ultimately, what does anyone gain from exploitation of this magnitude? How do I witness this ocean's past, present, and future? How do I attempt to atone for the United States' historical, current, and impending destruction and exploitation of the Pacific Ocean and the people who call it home? How do I name all of that? How to swim through it? How big is the Pacific Ocean, really? Nothing is so big it cannot be measured, right?" The heart of Best Synthetic Answer is a newly commissioned video installation, Best Synthetic Answer #1: Crossing..., that simulates a real-time journey from Johnson's birthplace-on the unceded territories of the Ohlone peoples in San Francisco-to Shanghai, China. Spanning seven months, Johnson's avatar-the "main character" of this work-swims in real-time across the Pacific Ocean, offering an immersive yet temporally unwieldy experience that attempts (and ultimately fails) to describe the immensity and multidimensionality of the Pacific specifically by following the wake of the United States' destructive interventions. In this work, several AI models are used to generate second-for-second theoretically "live" weather conditions of the Pacific Ocean from real-time weather data and existing freely available oceanic weather datasets. Each day and every second, Johnson's avatar navigates a hyper-specific pre-determined route across the Pacific, following the hubris of the nation of his birth, the United States. Every location his avatar passes through bears the marks of places the U.S. has sought to destroy, alter, or exploit, both land and people. As a "language-based" artist and poet, Rindon Johnson's works are fundamentally time-based; within them, Johnson inscribes time across what he considers living objects, raising questions about ownership, freedom, autonomy, exploitation, value, and waste. This exhibition invites viewers to focus on how art objects interact with the experience of being in the space of the real world and in real time. In a place where competition for land, redrawing borders, and occupations persists, Johnson proposes a divergent way of thinking about time as a layered depth-overlaid yet constantly eroding, always folding in on itself, circling back and flowing forward."-- provided by distributor.

Artificial intelligence.
Computational intelligence.
Ecology.
Transborder data flow.
Video art.
Intelligence artificielle.
Intelligence informatique.
Flux transfrontières de données.
Art vidéo.
artificial intelligence.
video art.

exhibition catalogs.
Ephemera
Exhibition catalogs
Catalogues d'exposition.

Zhu-Nowell, X, curator, editor.
Library Stack, distributor.