LABOR is pleased to present Oracle of Ashes, Antonio Vega Macotela’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.
Working in the most classical of techniques, charcoal and graphite on paper, Vega Macotela reflects on how AI systems learn from the data we have produced, and therefore inherit our biases and our habit of bending the rules. The danger is not a misaligned technology but our own misaligned values.
His starting point is footage of the very last frame recorded by a drone’s camera, “a camera in a bullet,” as he puts it. Once confined to the darkest corners of the internet, this kind of violence now reaches our everyday feeds alongside trending sounds, and we scroll past it as entertainment, rarely registering that the person on screen is real. The artist’s response is deliberately slow: copying each image by hand, over weeks, as an act of penance.
From there, the work turns to colonial history and Aztec cosmology, in which the apocalypse is a cycle of destruction and rebirth: every ending is also a beginning. Melancholy, also present in the work, is for the artist “a counterpoint to the capitalist spectacle: a state in which one feels, thinks, and sees everything with such intensity that one is stunned yet lucid, never alienated…”
While writing this text, we asked Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, what the next ten years might hold. At best, it said, faster and cheaper access to expertise; at worst, surveillance, manipulation and concentrated power.
An essay by Adrian Notz (that you can read here), commissioned for the exhibition, expands on these ideas. Notz is a lecturer at ETH Zürich and Adjunct Professor at the University of Hong Kong, and his work focuses on the intersection of art, science and technology.
Antonio Vega Macotela (b. 1980, Mexico City) lives and works between Mexico City and Barcelona. He has participated in the New Museum Triennial (2012), documenta 14 (2017) and the 34th São Paulo Biennial (2021). He is an Advisor at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.