In Conversation: Mat Chivers
by Anna Kovler
Nov, 2019
Whether he is looking at trance states, the human brain, ancient rocks, or the physics of clouds, Mat Chivers is always looking for patterns that unite the human species. His interest in science, ritual, and mark-making is coupled with a method of translating scientific data into visual form in a sort of reverse process from the initial drive that turns the visible world into data, maps, and info graphics. Relying frequently on state of the art digital, AI and robotic technology, Chivers reveals both the far reach of technology, and its inability to look philosophically at the world.
In his most recent project, Chivers invited over a thousand people to squeeze a piece of clay in the palm of their hands and used that data to teach an artificial intelligence to do a similar gesture. The results were robotically carved into a piece of impactite, rock that formed when an asteroid hit Québec. Towering over the palm-sized pieces of clay, the AI-generated shape appears clunky and forced, striated with the tell tale horizontal lines of digital cutting. Displayed alongside a series of Chivers’s precisely executed carbon drawings, the psychic tension between machine and hand is offered to the audience with no easy escape.
I spoke with Mat on the occasion of his exhibition Migrations at Arsenal Contemporary Art Montreal to find out what the impact of AI could potentially be, whether he thinks a machine can be an artist, and what he’s working on next.
Anna Kovler: In your work Migration (2018), how did you choose that scale for the AI version of the hand-formed clay?
Mat Chivers: I wanted there to be a difference between the AI-produced object and the clay hand imprints that emphasized the relationship between the scale of the human hand, and the mark of a machine intelligence whose imprint can be any scale because it doesn’t have a hand yet. For me, Migrations is about knowing something about what it is to be human in an extraordinary evolutionary moment, when we are faced with the massive impact that machine intelligence will have on our lives.
AK: Do you think a machine can be an artist?
MC: That’s a complex question, it invokes a strange feeling of horror in me! I actually see our technologies as a natural part of a wider evolutionary process, and I think that the term AI creates a division between us and our machines that doesn’t really exist. I think it’s more constructive to recognize that our tools and devices are prosthesis that allow us to engage with the world in a different way. They’re hybridized with our biology and using them changes who we are. Do I think a machine can be an artist? I believe that creative agency and authorship is much more diffused than is assumed in a modernist sense - where individual consciousnesses are authors of their actions. If we look at the nature of reality from a holistic perspective, it’s impossible to separate us from each other and the wider more-than-human environment. If we live with an expanded understanding of what agency and authorship is, then the status of the artist is called into question.
AK: Your work brings up the idea of opposites a lot, like handmade vs. machine-made, right brain vs. left brain, and thought vs. concrete objects. How do you relate to the idea of opposites?
MC: Yes, I often bring two things that seem very different into correspondence with each other to explore what they share. It seems that we’re still stuck in a way of seeing the world that’s been inherited from the tradition of Western scientific materialism, where everything is atomized and individuated. This philosophy stops us from living in a way that’s sustainable because it allows us to see someone or something as ‘other’. It can lead to an attitude where it’s okay to exploit others or resources regardless of the consequences. I feel we need to focus as a species on breaking down those false boundaries and to see the connections instead. Which is why now more than ever, we need to take care of our relationships with the world.
AK: You have been making drawings in pairs recently, where you make the right one with your left hand and the left one with your right hand. What inspired this method?
MC: Working on a series of drawings of my hands a couple of years ago, I realized that all my life I’ve drawn with my right hand. I even remember having a pencil taken out of my left hand by a teacher at school and put in my right hand. What I experienced then is a hangover from a way of thinking that reached its grizzliest outcome in the witch-hunts. At that time, the left side became associated with the practice of the so-called dark arts. It was considered anti-rational, anti-logical, and men found it incredibly threatening. Thousands of women were burned at the stake for practicing a way of living in harmony with the natural world. It’s a continuation of this imbalance in humanity’s psyche that’s led to the wanton destruction of the planets ecologies. For me, the action of drawing with both hands is a way of practicing a personal commitment to a more balanced relationship with reality, and in some way to deepen my understanding of my place in relation to the other species and ecologies that make up life on earth.
AK: Which hand are you better at drawing with?
MC: I kind of prefer the marks that I make with my left hand, but maybe that’s just because they’re new to me and I’m still in a state of wonder that it’s even possible to draw with the other side of my body! One of the main reasons I draw is because it allows me to experience myself thinking and feeling. The quality of attention that I’m looking for when I draw is like an altered state of consciousness and I’ve noticed that I seem to experience a different quality of attention with each hand. Neither are better or worse - just subtly different. I’m interested to see how that will change as my body becomes more used to drawing with both hands.
AK: Your drawings of swallows reference the “no certain return” of their migratory journey. Do you think that once we start using artificial intelligence that there is also no certain return?
MC: AI is already being used in ways that affect us all. I think it’s highly unlikely that humanity is capable of returning to a pre-technological state and I’m not sure if that’s even desirable anyway. In reality, we would probably need an extraordinary set of circumstances for AI to get to a point where it was more intelligent than humans. But if it does, the possible outcomes are mind-boggling and a daunting prospect to say the least.
AK: What are you working on next?
MC: I’m just starting to work on new drawings that extend the Where Do I End and You Begin diptych series that are on view at Arsenal Contemporary Art Montreal now. The Migrations shows - first at Musée d’art de Joliette, and now with new works included at Arsenal - have helped me learn more about what an exhibition, or a body of work can be, in terms of how all the parts work together to create meaning. This understanding is still informing what I do next. I was really affected by seeing Le Rêve (2018) projected at the scale it is at Arsenal Contemporary Art Montreal, and I’ve started to work on how I might make a new film. The narrative in Le Rêve is based on a vivid dream I had when I returned from my first research trip to Québec in 2017. I had another vivid dream just before leaving Montréal a couple of months ago, that I’m using as the seed for a new project.
Mat Chivers’s exhibition Migrations is currently on view at Arsenal Contemporary Art Montreal.
Mat Chivers, Le Rêve, 2018, Looped single channel video installation, 11 min.
Mat Chivers, Migration, 2018, Impactite, unfired clay, 66 ⅞” x 267 ⅝" x 366 ⅛" (170 x 680 x 930 cm)
Migrations, opening at Arsenal Contemporary Art Montreal