A CONVERSATION WITH SIMON DENNY
Simon Denny makes artworks that unpack stories about technology using painting, web-based media, installation, sculpture, print and video. He represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennial in 2015, has had exhibitions in museums and galleries in the US, Europe, Asia and the Pacific since the mid 2000s, and serves as professor for Time-based Media at the HFBK in Hamburg.
In this interview, Rina Nicolae from TITLES speaks to Simon about the aesthetic overlap between Italian Futurism and Silicon Valley’s defense-tech imaginary, what it means to be an artist in the age of autonomous systems, and how art has always been a collective endeavor.
Rina Nicolae: Tell me about your art practice these days. What are you thinking about and working on?
Simon Denny: So I am an artist who has worked with a ton of different media and formats, but most often I output in exhibition formats in museums and galleries. I have also made web projects and was quite involved in NFTs. But my focus has always taken cues from the people that make technology companies. I am really inspired by the vision of founders, and see a kind of confluence with the figure of the artist, so I look for cues for my own practice in the interests and directions founders take. In that way, over the last few years, I got really interested in how AI was being framed, and how suddenly aesthetics and visual canons were very important for technologists, and how even more recently, those worlds have also been focusing on Defense Tech as a category. So you get companies that, for example, use AI to produce autonomous weapons. The most well known of these is Anduril, and they and their design lead Jen Bucci have been inspiring a lot of my work lately.
I got really interested in the way they were using images that reminded me of Italian Futurist painting in their ads, particularly the later style known as Aeropittura (or Aeropainting). I combined that with reading the texts written by Marc Andreesen – especially his Techno-Optimist Manifesto – and his American Dynamism team, who invest in Anduril, among many other things.
All of this research happened at a time when I was also changing my technical stack, so to speak. I started to use various different tools for producing images with diffusion models, eventually landing on using ComfyUI to refine and blend Italian Futurist paintings with images published by tech companies like Anduril.
At the same time, I was also thinking of how to meaningfully work with these outputs. It didn’t make sense to produce only digital images if my main output is in exhibitions, so I also started to work with different painting machines and hacked together pipelines using plotters and inkjet printers to apply paint according to the images with some custom software some friends helped me with. So now I am making plotted and printed canvases that output these images based on conflating art history with contemporary technology advertising. I have had a couple of exhibitions of these already – in Berlin and in Auckland, where I grew up – and will present the next versions of them later this year in Venice, as part of a show at the Berggruen Institute.
RN: This vision of the future centers on the founder as an agentic individual, accompanied by imagery of machinic technological accelerationism. This is a vision that Italian Futurism shares. But I wonder whether this imaginary actually holds up when AI enters the picture, when we’re dealing with systems that are inhuman in scale and complexity. Are the frameworks Silicon Valley is reaching for too simple for what’s actually unfolding?
SD: So, one of the things that, for me, is so compelling right now is the invocation of these kinds of aesthetic histories in the face of AI’s emergence. The beauty of technological systems, the imaginary of their autonomy, a certain reverence for the unknown, the transgression of social norms and the boundaries of the human – all this resonates with the vision of the Italian Futurists. They didn’t have the tools we have today, but one could argue that the imaginaries of the future at that time transcended their “stack,” so to speak. It was a terrifying and violent vision also, intended to be thrilling and triumphalist.
But I think the gap you raise between these visions from the past and the realities of the present, as it unfolds, is what interests me. It interests me that these figures provide inspiration to our leading founders. It is also interesting for me to work with that in the current AI stacks I’m building. What would happen if one were to make a totally autonomous system out of my production process? Where would this thread lead? Maybe to something that is even more relevant to what we’re experiencing today. I am trying to involve more agents in the process, so that the outputs could almost paint themselves. Maybe if the full pipeline could work with itself — and I am just the observer — that would transcend the references into something other, beyond.
RN: It raises the question of agency, which I think gets complicated both by the emergence of intelligent, autonomous systems that we now can interface with on the individual level, and the dawning recognition that we are all nodes in a much larger network, which is a perspective shift that the internet has awakened. So where does that leave the artist? Who are you and what is your role in the scenario you’re describing?
SD: The art histories I draw on have a lot of precedent for taking cues from processes that make the role of the artist more of a prompter or co-agent anyway. One of the other parts of art history that I often think about when making is Pop Art. Maybe obviously, with my interest in the output of companies. And Warhol, for example, famously “wanted to be a machine,” often selected his ideas from other people’s ideas, would gladly not touch a painting that he authored in the making, and preferred easy things over harder things.
The reduction of agency in this position also had precursors – e.g. Surrealist and Dada uses of chance and games. The histories of art I love were often looking to give agency away, weaving the outputs of processes by other agents into a cultural narrative they were focused on. And this isn’t even mentioning earlier artistic work with computational systems explicitly with the beginning of generative and algorithmic art.
I see the advent of more sophisticated versions of these systems – now available to everyone, not just special researchers in massive institutions and companies in certain parts of the world – as just an invitation to tune and extend this logic. Art is a social project in the end. It’s whatever a community thinks makes sense within its canons. Who and what made the output are only a part of what the meaning ends up being, which is always created by the community that interprets and loves the work, and considers it important. So artists have always, in this sense, only been “prompting” wider social and cultural systems, even if the artists are the ones making the objects or images.
RN: There’s a kind of humility in that posture, an abdication of the importance of the self. What you describe as “prompting” wider social and cultural systems makes me think of certain internet art collectives, like the Remilia Corporation, which runs its work as a distributed, swarm-like performance using social media algorithms as its medium. But I’m curious where you think AI takes this, not just as a tool, but as a structural shift in how art gets made and what it means?
SD: I think this resonates with the kind of Copernican Moment that AI might force on us as a species. When we figured out that we were not the center of the universe, it forced us to think of ourselves differently. AI presents us with a similar juncture – it is the sum total of many people’s cultural information, thinking patterns, understandings, and various canons – some embedded as raw data, and some embedded in the systems that make AIs operate on that data to produce outputs. So therefore, it is both a kind of synthesised single agential point, but also always collective, always a summary of other people’s knowledge and backgrounds.
I think collectives (which have also been central to the art histories I love to learn about) have often seen value in anonymizing their contributors under group monikers. The one that comes to mind for me is Raindance Corporation, who were active in New York in the 1970s. They produced, among other things, the magazine Radical Software, but they also experimented early on with networked broadcast television as cable channels became available to people. They also had a physical base, where artists could borrow video cameras, shoot footage, and return it to a central, categorizable library. Other artists would then use that material to edit and produce montages of their own, which could be broadcast on the cable channels.
I have copies of their original incorporation certificate. I got to know one of the founding members very well before he died. I also have copies of the categories they used for their video footage sorting. I did a show that pulled these together at the ICA in London in 2012, along with a massive blow-up of the way they laid out their loft space, next to a giant analog TV broadcaster as it was being thrown out of one of the stations in London as they went digital.
It’s not the same dynamic as what groups like Remilia did in the age of social media (and it carried very different politics), but the thread of using collectives and a unified output name to produce experiments in new networked media resonates. Also interesting is that Raindance had many personal squabbles after their core era of activity, so maybe there is always a struggle in giving up agency to the collective. I hope we can learn more from AI on this.
RN: How do you think about the relationship between infrastructure and politics?
SD: There is always a politics to the structure of how infrastructural technologies are owned, deployed and governed, it’s just not always easy for everyone to see. Fred Turner’s book From Counteculture to Cyberculture told one story to me that I found useful in thinking about politics and the internet. It draws the line through the Whole Earth Catalog and the world of Stewart Brand, all the way to Wired in the 1990s and Facebook. But, of course, that’s kind of ancient history now (it was published in 2006). The strengthening of the right in those communities, in recent decades, is written in many Substacks and think pieces, and some academic and journalistic work. It’s interesting that Stripe press can publish both Stewart Brand’s most recent book and The Revolt of the Public. I wonder what a political analysis of those texts side by side would say about this political history.
RN: Last question – what does ownership mean for your work? What makes it yours, if there even is a boundary there?
SD: The fact that my business model relies on the idea that I make exceptional things that only I could produce – which is, seemingly, in contradiction with the claims to collective knowledge that AI inspires – but weirdly it’s never an issue. I think that’s because a significant amount of the value produced in art is contextual and social. Who’s doing what and where matters to the value of the artwork.
I also experience this from the non-artist side. I collect as well. I just bought a 1973 painting by Elica Balla, the daughter of one of the key figures of Italian Futurism, Giacomo Balla. It’s a beautiful painting of a lush forest with a fire in the middle of it. One thing about Italian Futurism that is often pointed out as problematic is that it was mostly men and kind of bro-y. It also didn’t work out very well – many of its visions of the future can be seen to have contributed to an authoritarian regime, a horrible war, and many people, including important Futurists, dying. So I thought an amazing painting made by Giacomo Balla’s daughter, Elica, in the 1970s — of a burning forest — has a kind of tension that speaks to today. What does the next generation, acting from a more liberal moment, from a different gendered position, do with the tools she developed with her father during the height of the previous regime?
The value of that object for me derives from who it was made by. It’s also not just about her mark-making – although that is the carrier of this information, in a way, its trace. It’s important because of what her context represents in dialogue with her own histories and interests, and mine. Artists and artworks are like that – their social and political economies are somehow captured in their objects. But where is the agency in that value creation? Is it with them?
