Hans Ulrich Obrist and Daniel Birnbaum on the New Digital Art Space

On a Sunday summer afternoon, L’OFFICIEL sat with legendary curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Daniel Birnbaum to discuss the future of art through augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR). Friends since the ‘90s, Obrist and Birnbaum have led critical theory and curation through a myriad of mediums, from apartment galleries to the Venice Biennale. In 2022, as Co-Director of the Serpentine Gallery and Director of AR/VR art production company Acute Art, respectively, Obrist and Birnbaum are at the forefront of technology and the new wave of artistic expression, participation, and criticism. Their excitement is palpable, and with infectious fervor, the conversation is merely the beginning of a fascinating paradigm shift of contemporary art, all thanks to AR/VR.

DANIEL BIRNBAUM: The dominant tendency in art, theory, and philosophy has been one of critique when it comes to new technologies. Think of The Frankfurt School’s deep skepticism of technological developments or Martin Heidegger’s apocalyptic idea of technology being the end of metaphysics. There are exceptions—problematic ones like techno-optimism in Italian futurism and Russian constructivism. Still, looking at the 20th century, you can find these moments of great techno affirmation. Once or twice every century, something new arrives that disturbs or changes the game. When it comes to AR and VR, we don’t know how they will relate to traditional structures and the art world or market, and for me, that’s an exciting moment. I presume there will be normalization and commercialization of AR/VR, which is less interesting from a point of view of experimentation. But the prophetic nature of art, not in the silly religious way, is that you normally see the future through the choice of medium. Artists are trying to push the limits, and they’re already almost doing things that can only be done in the next art form. Artists are not just mourning obsolete technologies and memories. They are willing to anticipate and affirm not-yet-defined territories, and they are the ones that are exploring.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: It takes some time for a different technology to emerge, but it’s about liberating and employing the poetic and intercultural potential of such technologies beyond their original intention. The experiments in technology by Billy Klüver have been a great inspiration because it’s about artists working together with technologists. At Klüver’s Bell Labs, they figured out how to have new experiments in art and technology by creating alliances and collaborations. We’re ready for these experiments.

L’OFFICIEL: What was the catalyst for creating exhibitions in a medium that feels more accessible to people who don’t necessarily have art history backgrounds? Currently, we have AR/VR on our phones and social media. Does it feel adaptable because it has already entered our daily lives?

HUO: These mediums can reach people outside of the traditional forum and formats of institutions. There is a kind of democratizing potential there. Not everyone lives in cities where there are great museums. We can find ways to go beyond exhibition spaces. Also, these works are like living organisms—they keep changing; they keep evolving. So you could imagine having a live simulation by an artist in a railway station, and every day you’d see the next evolution. I believe there is great potential for it in terms of public art. I think it’s also important that it’s free, that it should be congruent to Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the World Wide Web being for everyone. Still, I believe that we still do need exhibition spaces as well. There is a possibility for a multi-sensory experience in an exhibition that you can’t do at home on your computer or phone. Margaret Mead talks about the necessity of multi-sensory experiences that exhibitions can provide. An example is our recent Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster show at the Serpentine. There is a fascination with the old medium of the panorama; there is a Holorama, and then VR expands the possibilities. The show is Mixed Reality! I don’t think that’s something you can experience in your living room.

DB: We have shown VR inside museums, but these technologies create entirely new ways of distributing art, where you connect local audiences that are not just audiences but also part of the production.

L’O: Touching on that point, image has become ubiquitous, with more painters, less participation, more finite locations in galleries, and less performance happening. Do you think AR/VR is a solution for that? Is geospatial location a new aspect for artists to consider? What about participation?

DB: VR can weave components into the real world, and the dialogue and possibilities of juxtaposition and site specificity are fascinating. Nina Chanel Abney is a very politically engaged artist, so when we launched her Imaginary Friend as part of an anti-racist march in Washington, it meant something very different from when it was hovering in Hyde Park. It’s a little bit like graffiti. I understand why Kaws is interested in AR because it brings him back to street art and more or less illegal activities in the streets of New York. Acute Art shows have happened on every continent, from Latin America to the U.S. to Asia and Europe. It is a new kind of electronic biannual that reaches different audiences.

HUO: Regarding participation, I think about how institutions can provide a participatory infrastructure for technology with video games. Our Kaws project had approximately 150 million people in contact with the show. Regarding your question about participation, we have to look into video games. In 2022, 2.8 billion people (a third of the world’s population) will play video games, and participation plays a key role, as C. Thi Nguyen shows in his book Games: Agency as Art. Many visual artists modified and subverted existing video games. Some artists enter existing mainstream games, opening up new audiences and engagement, such as Kaws with his project for Fortnite, Acute, and the Serpentine. As game engines are more accessible, we see more and more artists invent their games to create virtual worlds of participation and inclusion. A great example is Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. She is an amazing and prolific artist, archivist, and game designer whose work centers on Black Trans people. She works with technologies such as video game design, CGI, animation, and sound to archive the Black Trans experience, creating games and spaces with and for the Black Trans community. As she designs and builds physical and virtual worlds, interactivity also plays a major role in every aspect of production and presentation. The viewer is also implicated in how each work progresses and is experienced. Imagine digital games not manufactured for the sense of an audience, but one in which games are a benefit of our subjective appeals. This idea where she had more diversity, more accessibility, more reality, and more inclusivity is crucial.

L’O: We’ve essentially gamified our digital extensions, which have now permeated analog interpersonal relationships. Does our understanding of relating to people help assess art’s purpose while changing our viewing process?

DB: There’s no doubt that that’s going on. It might be a little bit scary, all the controlling mechanisms and expectations that the machine world introduces that we uncritically let dominate our everyday lives. One would hope that art in these spaces would work in the other direction and rather create frictions and expand on the possibilities rather than just acquiescing. Probably the most effective interactive AR that we have been involved in was with Olafur Eliasson. You could place his sun and cloud at home, above your dog or next to your boyfriend. It was a way to interact with the pandemic, and for an ecological artist like Olafur, a way to examine how we inhabit the planet and relate to the natural world. When we worked with Tomás Saraceno, he reminded us that the virtual world is not in some different sphere, hovering somewhere in heaven; it’s made possible through electricity and hardwired through server parks. We created an exhibition with a large spider and a secondary spider around Serpentine Gallery that had to be found by the viewer. Saraceno is trying to write the phenomenology of the technological world and our contemporary world to develop ideas about biodiversity and technical diversity. His big virtual spiders that we placed all over the world are part of that; it is a participatory game that may seem like superficial social media, but, in reality, it helps us understand real spiders and their movement.

L’O: There is an environmental aspect to AR/VR that hasn’t been spoken about at length.

DB: Technology is not innocent; we know it consumes energy and electricity, but everything is relative compared to shipping art and traveling across the globe as we have been used to. The art fair model we have used for 25 years or more will not exist forever. There are other possibilities, and AR and VR will be part of new formations and new institutional possibilities. From the early ‘90s, a book had this wonderful dream scenario where bicycles on the top of some mountain trigger concerts in Moscow, London, and New York with small computers in their pockets that had pre-programmed robots all over the world. That is no longer so futuristic. We have these small computers in our pockets and participate in globally distributed cultural events. One doesn’t need pre-programmed robots; AR is much easier. The same show could happen in many cities at the same time. It’s not the answer to all our issues, but it’s a glimpse of new formations compared to shipping work and flying all the audiences to another part of the world. It’s still early, of course, but it’s already happening.

HUO: It’s the center of what we do at the Serpentine. We do environmental campaigns by artists analyzing how technology can be used to understand coordination. Just imagine millions of people participating in games that raise environmental awareness. We could use games in that direction, coming up with different ideas for how these new technologies are being used in the service of society. This is why we have to listen to artists and why we have to put artists at the center of this debate. Every company, every corporation should have an artist in residence or have an artist on the board. The time has come for that; we need to listen to artists who enable us to become immersed in a multitude of alternative realities: past, present, and future. These technologies can be used to completely change our awareness concerning the environment. Philip K. Dick once said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn’t go away.”

L’O: What do you see as the relationship between AI and AR/VR? And do you think that at some point, there will be an opening for AI to create AR/VR in a way that does fall within the institutional guidelines?

DB: There are dystopian and apocalyptic ideas of AI being a frightening force more threatening than the climate issue or nuclear weapons, but augmented reality pieces already have AI. We did this VR piece with Jeff Koons, and it had a ballerina who recognized you the second time, and she would know if you had been there before. So they’re less bombastic, and grand versions of AI are already part of many of these projects. The acceleration of technology going more or less vertical, going acute, is one of the reasons why it’s called Acute Art. At some point, the speed of how quickly technology develops is vertical, and one can no longer understand it. That’s when the singularity happens; hyper-humanity takes over, and it’s no longer human—it’s no longer understandable for us finite subjects. That’s the philosophy seminar we should have at some point.

HUO: It’s another immense topic: the relationship between art and AI as we adjust to new inputs. We have had numerous shows about AI at the Serpentine. The first one was Ian Cheng: BOB, and then we had exhibitions by Hito Steyerl and Pierre Huyghe, and later on, by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. It’s a crucial change in the status of the artwork and alludes to the idea of artwork as a living organism. Another great example is Philippe Parreno’s “Echo2” in the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, where the constitution is constantly changing thanks to the help of AI.

DB: New technology not only changes how we can produce artwork and distribute it to reach an audience, but also affects the ontology of the artwork: what an artwork is. Photography made the massive distribution of cinematic images possible and changed what an artwork is. That has happened again with the introduction of new technologies—with television and the internet—and now we’re in the middle of such a confusing, and maybe even stronger, paradigm shift. The artwork has become something that seems to be alive. Maybe it’s not alive the same way as a plant or an animal, but it has its agency; it keeps changing.

L’O: Has this been a natural evolution?

DB: I was just talking to Sanford Kwinter, and he was very interested in these developments of counterculture, especially in California. He reminded me of The Beatles song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and the early days of highly psychedelic drugs in the counterculture. He thought that VR was a less dangerous form of psychedelic drug—it is why I called the Acute Art AR showing in Seoul Kaleidoscope Eyes. It is to remind people that the tech possibility here has roots back 50 years ago—people dreamt of these possibilities that are now becoming mainstream.

HUO: Maybe we have to say with this conversation that this is Chapter One. We can’t bring it to an end because the themes are infinite. It’s nice that it stopped somewhere in the middle. It alludes to that infinity. So I will just stop talking now.