“What moves, the flag or the wind?”
November 7-December 7, 2023
Waiting for the Update, Duke Hall Gallery, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA
What moves, the flag or the wind? consists of a series of collaborative videos projected onto fabric scrims stretched across curved, steel armatures. Adopting the process and formal logic of ChatGPT, the videos respond to a series of prompts such as “make something without a beginning or end.” These questions were deliberately ambiguous in the style of zen koans: they require a level of intuition or interpretation to answer, and could be answered in visual gestures rather than in language.
By imitating the function of ChatGPT, we point to its limitations by re-inserting our human ability to understand and employ intuition, metaphor, poetics, and nuance— areas that AI presently struggles with. We also explore our human limitations in terms of productivity, and from having a body that exists in one place at a time.
Photography by Tom Cogill