“These speculative models are important as they offer different facets in which to view what Artificial Intelligence and computing actually might be, from angles more obtuse to the conversations we might already be having.” - Brandon Tay

Representative of artists invested in Southeast Asia’s growing tech landscape, Brandon Tay explores sentient life and new creature forms using cutting-edge technology. His practice is broadly informed by the history of computation, including Leibniz’s discovery of binary numeral system, based in part on Leibniz’s observation of the yin-yang symbol and his interest in African Geomancy, and Charles Babbage’s ideas in ‘Atmospheric memory, in which every sound ever recorded could be extracted from the air like the latent space of a neural network. Brandon Tay’s latest video EMULATOR (2024) and 3D-printed mixed media sculpture showcases an expanding practice in new media, employing technology as an assimilator for the past and the future.

EMULATOR introduces a universe informed by Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s orgone theory, an extension of Sigmund Freud’s idea of libidinal energy, where Reich’s ‘orgones’ form an omnipresent cosmic form of bioenergy. Utilising Artificial Intelligence (AI) to narrate a speculative history, Tay explores an alternative reality in the development of our servers, floppy disks, and printers. The very technologies that have been developed to enhance productivity and efficiency in our capitalist mode of production have instead become tools to speculate their own computational history. Tay also makes physical such a hypothetical saga and the complex theories underlying the video work through his sculpture modelled after the central avatar in EMULATOR.

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The 1960’s were a formative period for both consciousness studies and technology. With its epicenter in California, the period combined paradoxical beliefs from the political left and right to form a kind of hopeful technological determinism. EMULATOR is a hybrid essay/film that explores a speculative timeline that parallels our own history of artificial intelligence and computing in general.

Half of this palindromic film explores what happens if the thinking of this period resulted in different technological paradigms, based on New Age and fringe science beliefs- principally from the renegade thinker Wilheim Reich and his theories of Orgone. It traces an alternate reality in which tech has transitioned from a silicon-based paradigm to one which centers around biological processes and the transmission of desire, resulting in a cataclysmic post-singularity world, where various agents navigate an embodied version of our post-AI confusions.

The other half explores how various thinkers and writers-starting with Reich, as well as others like Philip K. Dick, Jacques Vallee, and John Lilly, experienced anomalous events in their lives, both connected to their own ideas of agency and current transhumanist beliefs surrounding AI. Presented as symmetrical complementaries resonating from the same historical nodal point, one viewed from another stub in the multiverse, and one looking back at our own, the work invites viewers to consider our own miraculous and stupid imaginations of AI through a dark mirror, perhaps to scry novel perspectives.

Video transcript here.

Film Credits:

EMULATOR by Brandon Tay

Logo and Text Animation by Darius Ou

Special Thanks to Daniel Felstead and Filipo Rosati

Supported by Umanesimo Artificiale/Transmedia Research Institute