SARAH SZE:
I think that the humanities and the arts only become more important in the light of the development of AI. Because AI is a tool, and as a tool, we need the humanities to tame it, to understand how it can actually be a huge benefit to society and not a threat.
REID:
Hi. I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way.
ARIA:
We’re speaking with visionaries in many fields, from art to geopolitics, and from healthcare to education.
REID:
These conversations showcase another kind of guest. Whether it’s Inflection’s Pi or OpenAI’s GPT-4, each episode will use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.
ARIA:
In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it’ll take to get there.
REID:
This is Possible.
REID:
AI is enabling people to reconfigure the way we create and experience visual art. From generative AI that produces digital images in seconds, to AI-powered tools that allow artists to experiment with new styles and techniques, the possibilities are endless. When wielded correctly, humans could use AI to expand the art world, as it allows anyone with an internet connection to express themselves through art.
ARIA:
But there are many unanswered questions. How can an artist give or decline permission for their work to be remixed and reconfigured via AI art generators? Who does the AI-generated image belong to beyond issues of copyright and ownership? Can AI even create art that is meaningful? Furthermore, can AI actually be creative or is that power innately and uniquely human?
REID:
AI-generated art is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Earlier this year, the world’s first AI art award was given at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, an international photography festival. It’s prompting more conversations than ever about what is and isn’t art, and whether AI is a tool or a threat to artists.
ARIA:
That’s why we’re talking to today’s guest. She has a decades-spanning career challenging the intrinsic values of art and exploring the relationship between the physical and the digital.
REID:
Sarah Sze is a celebrated American contemporary artist who is known for her unique installations and sculptures that are often made from everyday objects and materials. Sarah has had many exhibitions in prestigious galleries and museums around the world, and she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013. Her exhibition, Timelapse, just closed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
ARIA:
We sat down and talked to Sarah about AI and art, and what I loved most about hearing from Sarah was: There’s so much discussion that’s about, well, what if the AI art generators are taking my art, mashing them up, and then giving them to someone else, and someone else is using them? And we asked her about that. And, you know, she said specifically that this was her opinion alone, but that that was fantastic to her because she puts her art in the world for people to think about it, remix it, recreate it, and have a conversation back. So she wants to know what people are doing with her art. And she knows that it’s not hers. She’s putting the art out in the world so that other people can have those experiences, and that, in turn, will just inspire her to do more exciting and conversation-creating things.
REID:
Yeah. And kind of not surprising for someone who’s creative, who is kind of focused on the human experience, the space and time and memory and presence, that she looks at all of this as a possibility for magnifying what is meaningful about human life.
ARIA:
Here’s our conversation with Sarah Sze.
REID:
So recently, I had the pleasure and honor of listening to a talk of yours and then going—you know, in the Guggenheim—and then going to see the installation at the top floor. And apparently, the head of security told you that visitors are taking longer to go through your exhibition than any other he’s worked on. What’s your reaction to that?
SARAH SZE:
I mean, that’s my favorite, favorite comment I could get, really. You know, I mean, I think any exhibition is an experiment—an experiment of, in time and place, and with audience. And you spend all this time making a work. And there’s this amazing moment—you know, I think all of us have this when we create something and then we introduce it to the public. And you just see, it’s always an experiment of how they’re going to interact, and that’s really what makes the work. So, you know, having people slow down, pay attention, be in the moment, look—like, really spend time looking—is always my goal. I’m always interested in how you can change a museum space from being a place where you walk in and something’s on a mantlepiece or, you know, on a frame, and it says, “It’s important. You should know why. Figure it out.” to a place where you’re really discovering, you’re in the moment of, you know, asking questions, of remembering things, of recall, of, you know, creating your own narratives. That takes the time to really explore. And it’s a process of discovery. And you’re seeing things that way and not being told. So that, that’s sort of evidence of that to me, and I love that. So it’s really the best compliment I could get.
ARIA:
I mean, it was so fun as a, as a lifelong New Yorker, being in the Guggenheim and knowing the person who had created the installation. I just had a blast. So thank you for allowing us to come to that. But in addition to me, you of course have another very important Aria in your life, your youngest daughter. And I’m also, you know, a New York parent. And one of the reasons I think anyone is a New York parent is ’cause they want their kids to engage in this sort of culture that we have all around us. What is the best way that you have found to engage your kids in New York museums? Appreciate the museums? Was that hard? Was that easy? How do you instill that culture in your kids?
SARAH SZE:
You know, it’s interesting. I had a friend who is, is in their twenties. This is, I’m a little bit veering away, but someone said this to me just the other day, that they had a friend who was in their twenties who was, who felt very lonely in LA. And they’d come to New York, and they didn’t have any friends, and they, and they started by going to the museums. And there’s something about being in a museum where you have a relationship with an object, that it really talks to you about what it is to be human, I think. That when you, when you actually connect with a creative, you know, something that’s, you know, creatively made by another human being, whether it’s, you know, in ancient Egypt or, you know, your peer in a contemporary art, you know, way, you know, in the moment or in history, and you have a moment where you connect with humanity through an object, through an image—you have this kind of feeling of not being alone, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be with a person.
SARAH SZE:
So museums are these incredible places where I think you connect with humans over time. And being in a space with New York, what’s one of the things I do love about New York, is the museums are packed. And so you’re having this individual experience with objects, but you feel like everyone around you is too. So it becomes communal. So it’s this moment of a live interaction with a physical object that is also communal that. And I think that’s something with, you know, with so much being you know, not time-based. You know, my daughter—speaking of Aria my daughter—I remember the first time we took a JetBlue flight, and there was actual television, ahe was, like, trying to change it. She’s like, “What? Why is this on? You know, why is it?”—because it was an actual television. We hadn’t had television. We only watched things, you know, so she could always speed up or go backwards, or—she had no idea that there was actual broadcast television.
SARAH SZE:
And I think that, I think in that context, actually that things like, you know, sports events or like Emmys, are these amazing moments where we feel like everyone else is watching this at the same time. And we have so few things like that. So I think, I think that museums and art objects can function that way. And I think, I just, with children I think that, you know, one of the most important things for us to do as humans, in this country in particular, is to make museums totally open, totally accessible to everyone. And because I think that experience is so amazing, and what we need to make it is less rarefied. We need to make it free. We need to make the doors open. We need to, like, let people know that you can walk in. You know, the Guggenheim, I’m sure a huge, huge, huge—probably majority of the city, people who live in the city—do not know that you can enter it. You know, don’t know how to do that. And that’s, that’s really what needs to change. School groups need to go there. Educational groups need to go there. So that you really grow up, you know, knowing that that’s part of your, part of your public, part of your culture, part of your every day.
ARIA:
I love what you say about accessibility, and I think especially using sort of everyday objects. Like, the way I feel about museums is the way I feel about gyms—is that they can be intimidating if you’ve never been in one. They seem elitist. You have to pay lots of money. You’re like, I’m not physically fit enough. I don’t understand art well enough. Sort of, I can’t go inside. So…
SARAH SZE:
I hate gyms. I hate gyms, by the way. I hate gyms.
ARIA:
There you go.
SARAH SZE:
[Laugh] But I’m allowed in. I just can’t stand them. [Laugh]
ARIA:
You want, you want to make sure people don’t say the same thing about museums—that, you know, you’re a 10-year-old kid, and to your point, like, yeah, you’re welcome. Oh, you don’t, you don’t, you don’t have to interpret this my way. You could interpret it your way. And I feel like your art, like, tows the line between the physical and the digital, between chaos and order. Like, what, what about those dichotomies is interesting to you? Do they have more in common than we realize? How do you think about that?
SARAH SZE:
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a, for me—but I’m interested in hearing what you guys think about this—I mean, the digital is physical. It’s not a non-physical thing. This is a crazy, weird dichotomy that people have created. The digital, you know, it’s light—like what we’re experiencing. It’s light. It’s pixels. It’s this screen. You know, it’s this, you know, it’s like, it, it has, it’s organic. It burps. It messes up. It breaks. You know, we know we want to throw our, our phones across the wall like once a week because they’re not behaving, you know? So, and anything outside your eyes is physical. Right? It’s a physical thing. Like the imaginary, and we have an entire interior world that is not—that is in our heads, right? And that, but everything that’s outside our eyes is physical. So the digital is physical.
SARAH SZE:
So what I am playing around with a lot is making the digital feel more physical. So, like, making it gritty. Making it disappear. Making it feel like it’s suffering or dying or appearing strong or appearing soft, so that, you know, falling apart, so you see its pieces. So in, in the Guggenheim, these images that float around, you know, in the, in broad daylight, you know, that, that trace the space, so you’re seeing the digital merge with the real world in this way that I think we’re doing anyways. So it’s like playing, it’s kind of mimicking this, the way our minds are working, I think—where we see an image on our hand, we see an image on the screen, we see a real person—and that’s all being blended in this way. And I’m interested in how, you know, how that affects how we remember things, how we care about things, how we fall in love, how we feel lost. You know, because it’s real. It’s already here.
REID:
This also gives a great lens into one of the things we cover on Possible a lot, which is AI. And so, you know, obviously this blend between, you know, bits and atoms, where they intersect and what the dance is between them, you know, how does, how does this change the idea, maybe, of what is an art object and what intrinsic value objects have? Does, does, does the AI, you know, change this or evolve this in some way?
SARAH SZE:
A very smart friend of mine said to me, “You know what? I loved your show. You know what I loved about your show?” He said, “It was, it was evidence that, you know, AI is not going to take over.” You know, just ’cause he said, “an AI could never make this.” And he said, “That’s, you know, that’s the real question.” I mean, we, you know, I think that the humanities and the arts only become more important in the light of the, the development of AI. Because AI is a tool. It’s not a creature. And that, and as a tool, we need the humanities to tame it, and to guide it, and to use it in the way that—not, tame, may be too–you know, to, to understand how it can actually be a huge benefit to society and, and not a threat.
SARAH SZE:
And so that’s, that I think is something that the, the, you know, the tech and the humanity worlds need to, need to be more in conversation, I think. And it was interesting ’cause I just dropped my dropped—you know, I have a daughter in college—and there was a, it, it was an intro for the parents when you dropped your freshman off. And the, it said, it was a bunch of professors who said why I teach. And there was a, there was a guy who’s in computer science, and he said, “You know, actually, I don’t care if all of the papers are written in, in Chat.” And a lot of kids are doing that. It’s like completely, in some classes totally allowed. And he said, “Because I think actually all, most of these classes won’t be taught anymore anyways, because, you know, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll let—like a lot of these STEM classes will become irrelevant. And actually, we’ll only need the humanities classes, because those are the classes that Chat won’t be able to cover.” So I, that was a kind of an interesting, radical statement.
REID:
Fundamentally, yes, they’ll still study both. I completely 10,000% agree with your thing that it’s important to bring the humanist in. Because—much more than, you know, other technologies—this one, you know, affects how we have knowledge, how we, we, we compose ourselves as individuals in societies, how we communicate. It’s a language amplifier. And given all of that, it’s much more critical than ever, and to have the humanists, as it were in the loop, not as a, “This is bad—stop the AI,” which is like, no, that’s not going to work out that way. But to say, “How do we make it so that it helps us amplify our humanity? Be better? What are the ethical considerations? What are the humanist considerations? What are the artistic implications?” I think that’s the, the thing. But they’ll still have computer science. ‘Cause, by the way, it’s just that within a couple years, the most common programming language is going to be English.
ARIA:
Natural language. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I mean, sort of speaking more on the AI thread is like, people are hypothesizing that, like, one of the great things about AI is that it democratizes art. Like, anyone can be an artist with AI. Do you agree? You might say, like, why do we need AI for everyone to be an artist? Like, how do you see that?
SARAH SZE:
I mean, I entirely disagree. I mean, first of all, I think at, at, at the top of any field, creativity is always, is always—you know, when you look at the most interesting things that are happening in any field, creativity is the, is the key ingredient to making it the top of that field. So, you know, creativity is not just part of the arts. It’s actually the superpower of anything you do. And so, but I think there are interesting ideas about, like, the predictive that I actually have questions for you. I mean, I think AI’s knowledge base is about making predictions mostly. Is that correct?
REID:
Well, it’s—predictions is correct. And it’s actually more of a kind of a reasoning engine than a knowledge base. It happens to have a lot of knowledge in it as part of the how the reasoning engine is constructed. And part of the reasoning engine is prediction, because it’s a little bit like, what’s the next thing? And actually, I think one of the things that I’ve been thinking about writing about, in a sense, part of what we have with these large language models is, we have a, a kind of a reasoning creative engine that is based off the corpus of our language. And that’s the reason I say reasoning engine more than, like, certainly not a knowledge base. Like that’s, that’s what most people don’t understand and they think when they’re using, you know, Pi or ChatGPT, it’s like, you know, you know, give me Sarah Sze’s biography. And eh, okay. Then of course, it looks like it’s a knowledge engine versus, versus a, you know, what would happen if, like, what would Reid Hoffman’s art look like if he was an artist?
SARAH SZE:
Right. A much more interesting question. Yeah. So that’s, I mean, I think two of the things that are, you know, when you bring up the question as, as, as a visual artist, with creativity is, you know, your, your whole purpose is not to be predictable. So the predictive that, the idea that that, you know, there’s a, there’s an element of reasoning that’s based on the prediction. Like what can we predict about putting, you know, a conversation between Sarah Sze and Reid Hoffman. Like, that already is, is actually derivative. And so the idea of an artwork being derivative in my field is a huge negative, right? Like, the derivative—and, and it always, and that’s not to say that it isn’t always derivative because it is, right? We’re working from a history where even an artist is saying, “Oh, I thought about Rauschenberg. Oh, I thought about Eva Hesse. Oh, I thought about, you know, Yayoi Kusama.”
SARAH SZE:
Whoever you want to say. And those people are. And if you have an artist who doesn’t know that they’re, that the, that, you know, if there’s, you have an artist who wants to do a show at the Guggenheim and comes there and makes a whole bunch of paintings that look exactly like Andy Warhol, you’re going to say you’re derivative. Right? You’re derivative. So, but so, but you also need to know as a student, at a certain point, you can be a great artist. Like when I teach graduate students, every single student comes in, they are great artists. What, what they need to do is change the game by making something entirely new that we haven’t seen. Is that based on past knowledge? Absolutely. But the first thing you probably talk to them about is what’s derivative about their work.
SARAH SZE:
They, I think it’s been fought over between, whether it’s Einstein or Picasso, but, you know, “mediocre artist borrow, great artist steal.” But you learn stealing is about, look, being aware of what is derivative and, and creating something new that’s unpredictable out of it. When I’m making the Guggenheim, I do think the things that are, make it an interesting show are the things that I had no idea were going to happen. So I create all of these systems, and then within that system, I am following the process in this open way where the process starts to tell me what I’m doing. And being in that moment as a human being and reading, reading back from your own process is something that I think those, those moments of discovery that you have—whether it’s scientific or whether it’s creative—those moments, I actually think, are translated to the viewer.
SARAH SZE:
I think you, the viewer says, “Wow, how could anyone ever have thought of that?” And it’s really because of that moment. So that’s, that’s the thing that I think is, you know, a machine that’s trying to predict and that is using knowledge that’s derivative already is going to, is going to, I don’t know, those are things I think you’re, that are going to be hurdles, I would think. But you can tell me. because this is not my field. But I have one, I’ll add one other thing that I think is interesting. So I did a talk with Richard Axel. I don’t know if you know him. He’s a Nobel-Prize winner for, for discovering how the olfactory works in the brain. He’s a neuroscientist. Really brilliant person. And also a huge art lover. And he’s a professor at Columbia, and I did a talk with him. And he kind of embarrassingly started the talk by saying, “I just want you to all know upfront”—he’s very funny too. He just said, “This person I’m standing next to is actually more important than me, and I’m going to tell you why.” And he said, “Because if I hadn’t been alive, somebody would have discovered how the olfactory works in the brain. But if she hadn’t been alive, the artwork she’s making never would’ve existed.” And that’s kind of the crux of the issue here, right?
REID:
And how do you think AI changes this landscape? Because it, it obviously is, it unlocks a lot more potential creativity because unlike—you know, kind of like the classic thing to be a good artist, you have to have a lot of different, kind of, physical skills about how you put stuff together. Whereas now, you know, I can kind of think, you know, “Hey, create a, you know, an image that’s like the equivalent of if Albert Einstein was looking on LSD at black holes, you know, through a silver daguerreotype,” you know, and da da da da. And, and, and I can, if I have visual thinking, which not all human beings do, but if, if one does, one could do something like that. And so, so the, the, the, the capabilities of using these tools change the landscape of how art’s constructed. Does that change the value of art? Does it change what is art? Does it change what is an artist?
SARAH SZE:
So I think a lot of things about that. You said a lot. I think, so I think obviously we’re both talking about the same idea. It’s a tool. It’s a tool. You are using a tool. The, the, the driver is your question and how interesting your question is. And the tool is something to play with, right? And I think if people get confused by that, that’s, you know, they’re not, it’s, the AI is not the driver. You’re the driver by asking the more interesting question, right? So that’s one part of that question. I think the second question is, part of it is speed. Obviously, the speed at which it can, speed is really interesting here. And I think there’s been really interesting art created in times of speed. So when you look at, like, when the train, when trains were created, you know, that changed entirely the way—and, you know, Einstein was really interesting on that front.
SARAH SZE:
You know, he made, did the pat—he made patent—he worked in a patent office where they had to create patents for clocks, because that’s the first time we had to have, we had to all have universal time. Because when a train was landing in, you know, was arriving in Venice and then going to Rome, actually noon didn’t exist in both places, so they had to create universal time. So this, but speed of information during that time changed radically, right? When the airplane was created. And when you look at those periods in our history, there are really interesting artworks about speed and how that changed how we perceived ourselves as humans in the world. That didn’t mean that a painting wasn’t still as interesting a way to tell you about that, though. So I don’t, I don’t think, I think that the subject is fascinating and how we process information as humans when we know that it can come to us at that speed, and, and what that makes us feel about what it is to be alive on Earth is a really interesting question.
SARAH SZE:
But I don’t think that it makes, you know, the piano go obsolete. I don’t think that it makes, you know, a paintbrush, they’re not going to go out of business. I mean, in some ways the opposite. People are like looking for Kodak films. You know, those things become more valuable, right? So I think those are very unpredictable. I think that—I have like 20 other things to say, but I’ll go to just the authorship. So authorship I think is really interesting. Because, you know, images come from high, low—they’re manipulated. And that, so that’s something I’m interested in my work. You know, in the beginning when I started doing video, they said, “Uh, you’re going to be one of those video artists who needs the highest level.”
SARAH SZE:
I love, like the high, the low, the, the manipulated, the—because that’s what we’re getting. That’s, that’s the language. Like as you said, our visual language is, it is adapting at this incredible rate. You know, younger, you know, the younger you are, the more complex this is. This mixture, this amalgamation of, you know, what kind of images we’re getting and how images are replacing our verbal language, obviously, right? We’re going back to almost a pictographic language that we started with. So I think that authorship is really interesting, but I think all of these things are medium for fine arts. I don’t think they replace, you know, the, the artwork itself. We’re the ones asking the questions. We have to ask the right questions. And, and that’s what makes it interesting. And if we ask the wrong questions, it’s really not interesting and potentially dangerous. We know that.
ARIA:
I mean, it’s interesting. I think, again, when people start using AI, they often, they often say that. They often say, “Well, like, I’m getting junky responses.” And it’s like, well, you’re asking terrible questions. [Laugh] You know, you need to be, you need to be at that starting point. But so much of the discussion around AI and art has to do with copyright and ownership and, you know, “You’re stealing my images.” And so, I sort of can imagine how you would feel, but let me know, if your art was fed into AI, and then someone said, you know, “Can you create a piece in the style of Sarah Sze?” And rather than commissioning you personally, they used, you know, these sort of AI-derivative pieces. And so let’s take a look at some AI-generated art inspired by your body of work, right now.
ARIA:
Let me describe this for a minute for those who are listening. These AI images show indoor spaces filled with scaffolding, small screens, and models of planets all cluttered together. You can take a look for yourself in the transcript in the show notes.
SARAH SZE:
Oh, yeah, these are cool. I see. People have sent me these before. I mean, so for me, like, I don’t have a problem at all with this. You know, when I first started making artworks, I was, you know, doing mostly installation. When I started showing them publicly, it was back in the day in the nineties, early nineties, where you were not allowed to take pictures of artworks. You were not, like a guard would come up to you if you had a camera, which was much, much, much less likely, because people didn’t have cameras in their pockets and they would say, “No, you can’t take a picture.” And some artists still do that actually, or like, you know, they don’t want their films on. For me, and I was like, I actually said, “No, these are, these are, you know, installations—their world, I’m really interested in how people photograph them.”
SARAH SZE:
And they will anyways. I feel like it’s Prohibition with alcohol. It’s like, you can’t, people are still going to do it. Like, you know, it’s, it’s a losing battle. And like, these are all really interesting. Like, would I, would I know they weren’t my work? A hundred percent. But like, if, if I, if this were a film set for like a sci-fi movie, I’d be like, “That’s incredible.” I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t have a problem with ownership of, of these. I think they’re, I think they’re really interesting. I think copyright will be totally rewritten. I think, you know, I think, I know there’s a lot going on, and there’s battles going on, but give it a hundred years. It’s going to be—the rules will have to change. Because the trading of, the trade of images has changed radically in the last—it changes every week.
SARAH SZE:
And when that happens and people use them, you, you, you know, laws have to follow behavior. So and I, that’s my own personal feeling. I mean, I certainly, if it’s, if these are life-threatening, if they’re—as we know, my husband’s an oncologist; if people are dying, if they’re being used with warfare, if they’re nefarious, like, that’s a real problem. But if they’re being used to create, you know, imaginary worlds, wow, that’s, that’s amazing. So I feel like also my work is just a continuum of everyone else’s work anyways. I hope that I’m like talking to—I mean, it sounds like hubris—but I hope I’m talking to Vermeer. I hope I’m talking to Rembrandt. I hope I’m talking to, you know, Murasaki. You know, I think those are, that’s, that’s what all artists are doing. And like, when I go to the Met and I see, you know, a statue with no head and I have no idea who made it, you know, I don’t know what it looked like with the head, and it still moves me.
SARAH SZE:
I don’t need to know. So I, I don’t think my name is important. I also love that about my, my public art. Like, people go through LaGuardia. They go through the subway station. They have no idea who made it. I don’t care. You know, it’s an experience. And I don’t think, you know, half the artworks we have from, you know, centuries ago, we don’t know the names of artists, but we’re still appreciating, we’re still talking to them. We’re talking to them as humans. So, so that’s how I feel. But I know that for some artists, especially people who are in design, I think it’s a different, it’s a different problem because you really are reproducing the exact thing and making money off of it. So there are definitely different, different realms to this, where, where people’s livelihoods can be ruined.
SARAH SZE:
And I understand that. But for me it’s, it’s, I’m, I’m more interested in really a much larger contribution to a larger conversation where if my, if my work gets, gets, you know, mashed up—I mean, that’s a mash-up, right?—that’s interesting to me. That’s interesting. You know, I don’t post on Instagram, but I have an Instagram account, and I then, I hashtag myself, and I love looking at my work through the eyes of others. And often I find the most beautiful photographs and the most beautiful views of my work through other people’s that I don’t know and actually have my, I go in and I rephotograph their photographs, because they find these moments that I haven’t found. So, you know, they’re, again, many different uses of these tools. You know, I’m not using it to promote my own work. I’m using it as an actual camera to see my work. And it’s great.
REID:
I think your nuance on, “Look, there’s, there’s this new tool. It can amplify our humanity. It can be really good. We’re always in conversation. It can help conversation, and we just need to be careful about where it has substantive negative impact,” is exactly right. And I think a little bit of the art versus design is, I think, one interesting possible lens here. Because, you know, part of the, the thing about replacing artists is, you know, you could hire a human being today to say, you know, “Look at Sarah’s piece and make me another version of it.” You couldn’t resell it. [Laugh] Right? Or you’d have to make really, really clear that it’s not Sarah, right, that’s doing it. And I think art has a lot of that kind of, that, that, that kind of individual creator part of it, which I think is really good.
REID:
And I think the design part of it, you know, we’ll have to sort out how that exactly works. But it could also be around authentic, you know, the authentic branded thing. But, you know, what are you seeing that, that is good gestures for how people to look at, kind of people using AI to enhance their work, to being, amplifying themselves, to kind of show—as opposed to, you know, ’cause the, the media is usually full of all negative stuff—what are you seeing on the, on the positive side of that?
SARAH SZE:
I mean this idea of like Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. So this, that was a Walter Benjamin book that talked about, like, how art—the minute we had mechanical reproduction, we could reproduce things—it changed what the value of art was, and, and it questioned it.
REID:
Pi, could you explain?
Pi:
Walter Benjamin was a German philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist. He was active in the early-to-mid 20th century and is considered a key figure in the field of critical theory. Benjamin argued that the widespread availability and reproducibility of art in the age of mechanical reproduction undermined the aura of art. He believed that the uniqueness and authenticity of an original work of art, its aura, was a key factor in its perceived value and aesthetic impact. However, mass production made art more accessible to a wider audience and diminished its sense of rarity and uniqueness. As a result, Benjamin argued that art lost its special status as a sacred object and became more of a commodity—a product of industrial culture. This shift, he claimed, had significant implications for how art was perceived and valued.
SARAH SZE:
So I think that subject matter, right, well, this is a subject matter that’s really interesting. So if you are a person—like I think, you know, you can only make, I believe that you can only make the art that you make. You know, you can go and say, “I really wish I, I could say I really wish I made like, yeah, small watercolors.” But if I don’t, I can’t just, it really does come from, you know, having, I do think, having to make the work you make. You don’t get to, you don’t get to choose. So in that way, you know, it’s a very, very, very unique endeavor. So when something is reproduced, or reproducibility is part of your subject matter. So, if that’s something you’re interested in, like Warhol was very interested in that, right? He made a passion out of that, and his work, even, there’s a, it brings up all those questions about, well, if I have it printed on a mug, and I enjoy it, like, is that what, where’s the value?
SARAH SZE:
You know? And he, he played with the value of that. So like he, you know, he took Brillo boxes, and he, you know, he signed them, and he, he sold them for a hundred dollars, and he threw them out there. And now, you know, he played on that. So you could make that the subject of your work, I think. But I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think that, I think that there is a difference between a, a visual thing. A visual thing. Whether it’s, you know, a painting, an object, digital thing—I don’t care, anything outside your eyes—a music, it could be writing, that makes you have this profound moment where you feel connected to humanity over centuries. And that’s a very specific kind of art. That’s very specific. It’s not, I’m not, it’s not saying, it doesn’t, doesn’t deny other kinds of art or other mediums, but it’s a very specific endeavor.
SARAH SZE:
You know, and, and I don’t think AI will ever replace that. I just don’t. It may, it may be really great at like, at things that are like driven, like, you know, graphic design—like, can it make the golden arches of, of a McDonald’s? Maybe. But also the, you know, graphic design’s also one of these incredible things where you, you—there’s some things that like no one would ever guess would be successful, right? You know, these things, you don’t like, that’s what you know, great, you know, great advertisers are doing all the time. They actually find things that are not obvious and that really like, that link onto things. And so that’s the human experiment thing about when you put something out there and you really just don’t know. You don’t know what it’s going to be. And so if it’s predictable or if it’s reasonable, it’s not always going to be the most interesting thing. And I think humans are, are really, and you know, they take that, they’re going to occupy that.
REID:
Have you had any kind of play yet with any of the, the kind of AI art tools? And is there anything that you discovered that you thought was, that was particularly like, “Ah, this really opens up”—like, for example, opens up a concept of time and space, which I know you think about a lot, or memory, which I know you also think about a lot.
SARAH SZE:
So there’s, so many, I mean, I get so many offers all the time, and I have been—you know, it was funny, I remember, I was like asked to dom I, so I did do an AR, I did an AR piece during COVID because I, I felt like people aren’t allowed, they can’t get out of their houses. They can’t experience these things. I did a piece in Paris, and it was closed. No one could go see it. So we did an AR piece where that piece came to your, came to your house. Like, you held up your, you held up your phone, your camera, and all of a sudden these images were flying around your own house. So there’s ways in which you can, of course, you know, I think half the shows I see, I think I’ve seen them virtually, right?
SARAH SZE:
And you can’t remember if you’ve seen that show or not. I mean, it’s, it’s actively part of seeing artwork, I think, already. But I have been very resistant to diving in because I’ve felt like I haven’t found one where I felt like it was more interesting than the tools—like the—I’m more interested in you going into one of my shows and thinking about, ‘Oh, what’s happening?’ There’s a, there’s this, there’s this confusion between whether it’s digital or physical. Like, and having this live moment. And I have, and I, so, you know, for example, in the Guggenheim, there’s a pendulum that’s rocking and underneath it, over the sand, there’s a video that’s, that has a random path of a moon. And your eye keeps trying to make the pendulum and the random path meet. Though if you think, when you spend time with it, you realize, okay, there’s no relationship.
SARAH SZE:
That’s a video that’s already been pre-programmed. That’s a pendulum that has, you know, it has an arm that’s making it swing at random, but you can’t stop it. Your head keeps trying to make them a shadow of one another, magnetized, talking to each other. And so for me, that was this incredible moment that I’d found actually in a different piece, in a Paris piece, and said, “This is great. I’m, I found this. I’m going to bring it in.” It’s a kind of real-time example of how I feel a lot, where I’m like, “Did this happen? Did this happen real time? Is it digital? Is it not?” And this is one of my favorite questions to ask younger people. And I dare any of you to do it. What’s a time where you were, in your day, where you were confused about whether something was digital or physical?
SARAH SZE:
And they tell you the most amazing answers. So this one kid said to me, “It’s, well, it’s when I’m going home on the subway, when I go under, under, you know, under the water to go to Brooklyn, and I’m reading a book, and I think the book’s going to go dead.” So he’s already gone backwards. He’s made the physical into the digital, and he anticipates it shutting off. And so this is like, this is what, you know, this is the experience of our world. And that is the every, you know, we are completely digitally dependent. We know that. All of us, right? And it’s, it’s knitted into our worlds, even, you know, and, and it became across ages. Like my parents learned how to order groceries ’cause they had to. So COVID accelerated that even more, right? And so we really have to figure out what is that doing to our, to our, you know, to the way we communicate? And, and put it and, you know, and think about it, think about it. Ask questions about it.
SARAH SZE:
So, you know, and I don’t even mean this in a negative way. I always think about like the, what I’m about to say. I don’t, I don’t think of this in a negative way. But it’ll be interesting, Reid and Aria, if you think this is negative. I like to think about different mediums and what they do best. Like what can a sculpture do really well? Like it can deal with gravity. It can deal with your body and space. You understand it. You can go around it. You can touch it. Whereas like a photograph, you never get what’s left or right. So it creates this, you know, so, or a painting, you know, it can create deep space. It can, you put a paint, I put my paintings in my house, and they all look bigger. I put a sculpture, and I have no space.
SARAH SZE:
You know, they’re these things that they do. So what I think the digital does artistically, for me, more than anything, is it creates longing. And this isn’t, and I don’t mean that in a negative way, because longing is a deep human’s experience that—you know, is, as, you can look at like Dürer’s Melencolia. I mean, because the digital always want, I think, always leaves you wanting more. You want to know what it smells like. You want to touch it. You want, you want more. You want the full experience. And you never—you, you think you have it. It can trick you into having. But you, you’re not there. So I think that longing is, and then longing can be great. I do all of my yoga classes digitally. I go on Zoom. And I actually love it because I’m private, and I don’t have to travel.
SARAH SZE:
And, and she looks at the screen, and she tells me stuff. And so I’m with her, and I’m with this group around the world in different time, and we’re doing this thing together. It’s the most physical thing I do in my day. And it actually works out to be a COVID, you know, these, these COVID holdovers that where you’re like, “Actually, I don’t want to do this in person. I like this.” And you, it’s like the last thing I would’ve thought was in person. So I, and it creates this kind of community, but privacy at the same time. So they’re really interesting things, I think, that can, that come from it, but they’re not always what you expect. But I think longing is, is the, you know, it’s the superpower of, of the digital. And, and we, we have longing all the time.
SARAH SZE:
It’s what, it makes, you know, does, does AI have longing? I don’t know about that. Like, you know, I mean that, that’s, that’s an, that’s an interesting question. And I mean, we, we ask, “Does it have empathy?” But does it long to be something? You know, I think probably longing has something to do with the fact that we have an, we have a knowledge of our own expiration dates, so that, you know—and that’s something that an AI doesn’t have. Or you can try and teach it, obviously, but like, does it actually feel it in a soulful way? We don’t know, right? Can we do that? I mean, those are the endpoints, right? That is the outer, outer edges.
ARIA:
So funny, I, like, I, everything you said resonated with me. I mean, whenever we go in the car with my kids and they don’t understand that their laptop can’t have internet—because to them, the internet is nothing because it’s everything—like they just, that doesn’t even occur to them. Or I was talking to my husband—who, who’s sort of an amateur photographer, and he takes these amazing photos—and when he’s editing them, I’m like, “Chris, you can’t edit them to make it look better than it was.” And he goes, “I’m not. A photograph can’t possibly capture the beauty of where we were in person.” And he’s like, “My editing is just trying to capture that beauty.” Because the, you know, the physical and the, the digital are always in conversation. And I just, I think that’s so true. You can’t even sort of separate them. Because, you know, where does one start and the other end?
SARAH SZE:
I mean, the photography is completely—I mean, in the last 50 years—it’s completely turned on its head. You know, when I was, when I, I did black-and-white photography, you had a bunch of negatives. You decided which ones were good. You limited an edition, and you destroyed the other ones. You know? It’s now there, I think the photograph has completely disappeared into a moving image, right? It’s gone back. So it started, you know, the photograph created the moving image at, at, at Reid Hoffman’s college, which used to be a farm. What, where they, you know, that’s where the first experiments with, you know, Leland Stanfordand, you know, had a bet that all four legs of a horse were in the air while they were running. And he hired a photographer to actually go and do the—Muybridge, Eadweard Muybridge—to actually create this system where he was photographing on, on the, the, I wonder where exactly. And I think it’s still there.
SARAH SZE:
There’s the, the ring is still at, on Stanford, I think, campus. And, and that’s where they, that’s really, you know, people think about the first film. The French say, you know, it’s a different experiment, but which, which was happening at the same time with birds. And Marais was doing that, that experiment, at exactly the same time, was looking at how birds move. So animals, the, the, the photography of animals, was what created film. But I think we’re just gone totally backwards now. Like, nobody watches a still image. Always, you’re always scrolling. You’re always, you know, my, like live, taking a live image to my 13-year-old’s—you never take a still image, ’cause a live, you can choose like 25 images, right? So I, you know, the manipulation of the image, the image is, it’s like a painting now.
SARAH SZE:
I totally agree with that on your husband. And it’s not capturing the moment. That’s a, you know, it doesn’t have, it can’t see what’s over here. It doesn’t have peripheral images. This is what the cubists were doing. The cubists were talking about the fact that when you’re in space, everything’s moving. Your eyes are moving. There’s things fluttering. There’s, you know, atoms are moving. You’re in movement yourself. So, like, to, a still picture is a, is a, you know, is a fantasy. So how, then they were talking about how do you make, how do you paint something and then try and paint it from ten perspectives at the same time? To, to talk about that idea that we’re all in movement. So to me, it’s interesting if AI is the subject, and is the tool, but I don’t think it’s the replacement. I don’t think it can compete.
REID:
What do you think is kind of the, the, the path that you’re on right now for what you’re elaborating? Like, what kinds of themes are you thinking about? What kinds of, of, kind of experiences, memory, time, and space? You know, how are you, how are you going—you know, which, which way are you sailing and rowing right now in your, kind of, experience and mind and creation?
SARAH SZE:
Mhm. So it was really interesting, I did a piece that had to happen right after the Guggenheim opened—because of COVID, everything piled up—and it had to happen really quickly. And it’s something, there’s something really interesting about, you know, the limits of time and then making creative decisions that you can’t look back on. So I made this piece, and it was like a, it was like a visual poem. And we, it actually had, it actually had a language to it. It’s, it’s, it was in an old Victorian station. It just came down. It’s going to Italy. It’s called Metronome. And it was caught between two passing trains. But I’m trying to explain what it was. I did a really good podcast with this guy Ben Luke right after it, which I was like, “Wow. It’s so interesting.”
SARAH SZE:
Because again, it was like, I, it was, I couldn’t even question what it was. It was so on the top, you know, on the tip of my tongue. But I’m, I would say what was really interesting to me was, it is, it had language in it. And then I decided the language was too literal and took it out. And you have this sense of, of a rhythm, of a refrain of chapters, in this visual way. And it’s complete visual overload. There’s about 500 screens all happening at the same time. But they have almost a symphonic quality to them in chapters. And, and it was a really quick decision to say, “Okay, the narrative gets taken out.” There was a voice, there were people speaking, and it was taken out. And what was left is this actually-really-interesting rhythmic visual.
SARAH SZE:
And it was, it was, it’s a very moving piece, I think. It has—people also like cry in it, and they don’t, you don’t know why. And I think again, it has this sense of, sort of, loss, of longing, of fragility. You know, of the passing of time. You know, someone who was very old said—you know, I’m, I’m, I’m 54, so I’m not that young at all—but someone who was in their eighties said, “I don’t know how you would make this piece, because it’s a piece that an 80-year-old would make.” Because it’s, there’s so much about, shoot, about, you know, about the end of life in it, she said. But I mean, that’s not actually what I was, you know, particularly going for in any way. But it was this idea of fragility, of, you know, how fragile life is. So, you know, it’s somehow threaded into this digital narrative.
SARAH SZE:
So it’s, that’s very, very vague. But I’m interested in—I’m interested in playing with these tools and seeing, and really finding, like finding the fragile in them. You know? And then making that moment become a moment for the viewer. And that they recognize. That they’re like, “Wait, I know this experience in my real life.” Then, “I know this sense of confusion or loss or finding.” And a part of the, a part of the interesting thing about losing your footing is also then regaining it. Like, where do you, where do you regain and how those breaks in your life are the things that you remember. So I’m interested in how, you know, how things become valuable in terms of how they imprint on you and your memory and how they affect how you move forward. Right? So one of the things that’s fascinating to me is, if you go see art—for me, let’s say art, you know, I go, let’s say to San Francisco, look at a bunch of art, and I’m like, “Ah, I like this. I like this. This was great. This was interesting. This moved me. This didn’t,” and then I, I look back at it a month later, there’s like usually like one thing that—and maybe a thing that I didn’t think I liked, or disturbed me—but one thing that really like, really stayed with me, and I’m going to think about it, and it’s going to change. So you have to learn things over a long period, sort of—what sticks with you over a long period of time is really interesting. So I’m interested in making that little skip in the record that, that then imprints, and then having people question what is imprinting and what is changing the way they think along the way.
REID:
So moving to our rapid-fire section, is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?
SARAH SZE:
I’m just going to rapid fire. I’m thinking of this, I love this movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, and it’s just this incredible movie about resilience, and the acting in it is phenomenal. And it’s this mix of documentary, and, I mean, it’s a fiction film, but a lot of the actors were found on site. And it’s this, it’s about storytelling. Memory. When we were talking about photography, like, the cinematography is absolutely beautiful in it. And it’s—it’s about humanity. So it’s, it’s, it’s a great movie.
ARIA:
Such a good movie. So this next question, it can be either trivial or, or deep—whichever you prefer. But what’s a question that you wish people would ask you more often?
SARAH SZE:
Interesting. Well, I’m going to, I’m going to put it on my, in the context of my artwork. I love it when people will say like, it’s interesting because people will think, ‘Oh, what do you say to someone after you see their work? You know, what do they really want to hear?’ I do love it when people tell me very specific things that, that, that they saw and affected them. Because part of the thing that I’m trying to do with my work is to have an experience that is so diverse that no two people will have the same experience. So that if I ask you and Reid like, what was your favorite thing about the Guggenheim? Just like one little thing. I’m going rapid-fire back. [Laugh] What is, like, what, what’s the one thing that, Aria, you remember? Like, just one thing that really affected you?
ARIA:
To me it was the perfect meld of the Guggenheim’s space with your artwork. So I couldn’t imagine the installation elsewhere, because I thought the space spoke to your art. And then your art spoke back, which was very cool.
SARAH SZE:
Yeah, I love that. Because I was like, the real, one of the real challenges was how do I make a piece that feels totally married to this building—where the building made the work and the work made the building. So that’s a great answer, but it could be any answer. Okay. Reid, you’re next. I turned the tables.
REID:
You know, I find that on the Timelapse, you know, the kind of thinking about what time meant to meaning and kind of, how you, how the kind of, it’s like the, the kind of the, all of the everyday objects are kind of like—how our everyday life and time combines in the meeting. And so I, you know, the fact that your perspective changes as you walk around it, as you look towards the wall, you look towards the, you know, the kind of the, the complex centerpiece desk-slash-studio-slash-something [laugh]. RIght, you know exactly what it is—that, that experience of time had me reflecting on it.
SARAH SZE:
That’s beautiful. That’s the philosopher in you.
REID:
Yes.
SARAH SZE:
[Laugh] Absolutely. But I think the reason why I switched that over is because I think people often think, you know, they say, “What does the work mean?” Or they want to know, they want to know the answer from the artist. But I think it’s interesting to open and say there isn’t, you know, it’s really about the experience of the viewer. Like that is as important as what the artist means. As an artist, you know, you have to assume you’re not going to be around when the work is there. And so it’s really, you know, the art is created by the viewer. To hear—it’s the same thing as looking at Instagram photographs—for, as an artist, to hear what you pick and what you see is really, is, that’s—I wish people would tell me more, “This is the one thing. I love this one thing.” Because it’s always different. People always have a different, you know, perspective in, and that’s really what an artwork is. It’s a meeting of your mind with my mind through an object or through an experience.
REID:
Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?
SARAH SZE:
So I think, you know, I think for me, of course, progress in future always resides in children. Right? And so I think, you know, I think, I do think that generationally—I’m not sure, and I don’t want to make generation—generalizations—but I work with people through all ages, and I have a 13-year-old. So I think that they are, they are, they’re trying to ask the questions about what, like, how to use these tools in interesting ways. And, and there, there is like a kind of real fresh interest in what their potential is. I think that they, you know, originally there was, there’s a, there’s sort of a generation right after mine, which is sort of what, which rightly feels like, “Well, this is what you left us with?” [Laugh] You know, the environment. These things. But I think the younger generation is really interesting because, like, in their early twenties because they are, they’re actually very interested in seeing what the potential is. Like tearing the thing apart, like turning it over and looking at it from all sides.
ARIA:
On that note, that this can also be sort of focused on art or much more broad, but can you leave us with a final thought on what you think it’s possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity’s way—if everything goes right in the next 15 years? And what’s our first step to, to move in that positive direction?
SARAH SZE:
I think culture is our, our, our greatest, it’s our, it’s before we leave, it’s what we’re going to leave if, you know, if we’re found by another planet. It’s, it’s what’s going to, it’s what’s going to be the most interesting thing. It’s going to be, you know, listening to pictures from an exhibition. You know, that’s, that’s going to be our, our stamp of time. You know, it’s going to be looking at a Georgia O’Keeffe. You know, those are the things that are going to be our time capsule. And so, I think, you know, even if—that, I guess I’m talking about if everything doesn’t go our way, and there’s just this little time capsule left—like that’s what we want to, that’s what we want to have in it, I think. So to me, you know, this idea that art is sustenance, that art is, is an expression of what it is to be alive on Earth—for that to be, so what we, I’m doing it in the opposite. I’m saying that’s what remains. But if we could make that be a language and, and thread that language more deeply in, into the future culture that we’re creating, I think that would be a great way to go.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network, hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, and Paloma Moreno Jiménez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Katie Sanders, Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, and Ben Relles. And a big thank you to Christin Graham and Little Monster Media Company.