BCA Talk｜Celyn Bricker：AI and digital simulations represent a continuation of this desire to create ever more perfect mirrors of reality
Celyn Bricker is a visual artist from the UK. His art practice focuses on exploring the relationship between technology, humans and nature. His works have been featured in the Shanghai Biennale, UCCA “Immaterial/Re-material: A Brief History of Computing Art” and UCCA LAB “Virtual Niche”, and are collected by domestic and foreign collectors, government agencies and art institutions. BCA is pleased to have an interview with Celyn Bricker and have a conversation about his artistic creation and his views on the issues related to NFT carbon emissions.
Celyn Bricker
Artist
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I grew up near Liverpool, UK, and studied Fine Art at Edinburgh University. Although my background is in Painting, my art practice has always been quite varied. I’ve often worked on collaborative projects, making both digital and physical pieces, with a focus on what you might call ‘social practice’ art. In more recent years I’ve become more interested in making art that explores our relationship with the natural world. At the same time, my interest in collaboration led me to explore working the GANs and AI models, with the idea of the machine as a potential collaborator. Alongside my practice as an individual artist, I have also recently co-founded CELU studio, a multidisciplinary art and design studio. We are currently working on an art project to protect biodiversity in cities (birdlife in particular), a documentary, and some public art pieces that can neutralise pollution.
Can you talk us through the process of creating “After the Rain”?
“After the Rain” is part of a recent series that are created using AI but also respond to the presence of a viewer. In this piece, I used a GAN to create an artificially imagined rainforest, then manipulated the output to give the feeling of moving through the space of this forest. The process of creating it is quite lengthy, starting with the collection of the dataset, which I then extensively edit before using it for model training. Having used this particular GAN many times, I am familiar with the relationship between the data input and the output made by the GAN. In order to shape the quality of the output, I spend a huge amount of time editing and manipulating the images I am inputing. In some ways I have come to see the organisation of the data set almost like mixing colours for a painting. The second part of the process is developing the interactive element. In this piece, it is programmed in such a way that it is only visible if someone is looking at it directly. When the observer looks away, the image fades from view, but the underlying piece continues to shift and change. This required using what are known as Haar Cascades for object detection.
The piece was about our relationship with technology and nature, but also about the connection between reality and attention. In both a philosophical and practical sense, it is the quality of our attention that shapes our reality. The piece is I hope meditative in some sense. One person looking at it told me it made them feel more connected to nature somehow, that they felt more ‘part of nature’ when looking at it. I was happy to hear this kind of feedback.
Your artistic practice explores human relationship with nature. Why is that important to you as an artist?
I’m interested in this topic both practically and philosophically. It’s a huge subject to explore because our conflicted relationship with the natural world is ancient, and I feel it is somehow a fundamental feature of being human. You can even look back to the artwork on the Parthenon from the 5th Century BC and see how it represents this contradiction, in the conflict between the Lapiths and the Centaurs. Much of human culture since that time is a kind of edifice built up to shield people from the realisation that they are also just animals – but at the same time, depending on how you ask the question, many people today will describe humans as a part of nature, and not something separate from it. This I think can extend to the things we create – in some way an AI is something ‘unnatural’ and ‘artificial’, and at the same time, if we are part of the natural world, then the tools we create are part of nature too. It is contradictions of some this kind that I find fascinating to explore in my work.
Artists called NFTs an “ecological nightmare pyramid scheme” because crypto art generates massive carbon footprints. What do you think of the trade-off between its negative effect on the planet and its positive gains for artists?
That is certainly a powerful and memorable way to phrase it. The issue regarding the carbon produced by crypto art is important and something I think all artists using this technology should contend with. For my piece in Virtual Niche, I ensured that the carbon emissions were offset. This is far from the perfect solution and I am aware of course of the criticisms of carbon offsetting. At the same time, this technology and NFTs are here to stay – they represent quite a fundamental change in the way things are done, and this change will spread to many industries beyond just finance and art. The question for me then became whether to refrain from using NFTs altogether, or to participate in a limited way and contribute something to the conversation regarding carbon offsetting. I had hoped that by showing in Virtual Niche and raising the issue of carbon offsetting, it may help encourage more people to think about it in China, as the impact of NFTs are not yet an issue people are fully aware of. There are however some excellent NGOs in China already that support high quality carbon offsetting schemes, some of which helps also with poverty alleviation projects. There are other interesting companies like Offsetra in the UK that have similarly beneficial carbon offsetting schemes, and also have a platform to help calculate the emissions created by any particular NFT. There are more and more people addressing this issue now, and I’ve been heartened by the attempts to create less carbon intensive blockchain technologies. I hope soon there won’t need to be any tradeoff between carbon emissions and benefits to artists, and hopefully more artists will move to eco-friendly NFT platforms as they emerge. In the meantime, if all the artists currently rushing to use NFTs also offset their work with good-quality carbon offsetting projects, that in itself could create a great benefit for many communities.
Your featured artworks at Re-material(A Brief History of Computing Art) and Virtual Niche exhibition are interactive installations. In your opinion, how computer art differ from traditional art?
I’m not sure I see such a great distinction between the two, given the extent that computers are now so integrated into everything we do and into the majority of artists’ art practice at some level. This trend has of course been accelerated during 2020, which also shifted people’s experience of art to be primarily digital rather than physical; this is a reflection of the fact that for many people, digital images are actually their primary experience of reality. Many people’s waking hours are spent looking a screen rather than at the ‘real’ world. This is in part what can account for the sudden interest in the possibilities of NFTs, and at the same time an NFT is some way is able to erode this distinction between computer art and traditional art. One of the defining features of digital art is its infinite reproducibility, which distinguishes it from a physical piece of art, but NFTs mean the experience of ownership is fundamentally different, which in turn alters fundamentally the psychological experience of the art in some way. From another perspective, one of the many reasons I’m interested in AI is that I feel it actually picks up the thread of a very ancient aspect of art, which is about creating an ever more faithful representation of reality. This of course is not what classical or traditional art was ever exclusively about, but it is a thread that was decisively disrupted by the invention of the camera. I think AI and digital simulations in some way represent a continuation of this desire to create ever more perfect mirrors of reality.
