Artist Statement
Aaron Oldenburg

I feel like I should go into why I make art now, or why I make specific pieces. All I can think of when I look back is when I was in high school and wondering why video games couldn't be more like Derek Jarman movies, or why they couldn't reproduce the feeling of wandering around at night with Anais Nin on my mind, or seeing the plants and animals at night breathe after reading Carlos Castaneda. Why couldn't they do that?

I've always been oriented toward games, and since I was a kid I've been very susceptible to artificial intelligence. Back then I programmed a simple “type your question and get a yes or no answer” program that I conversed with for an hour and believed that there was some kind of presence behind the screen, maybe Satan. I don't think it scared me, it was just weird. And I think I would be a poor choice for a Turing test, since I'm convinced that everything I talk to is human.

There is something about games, their oversimplification of structures, that make them a good escape from ambiguities of real life, especially those in human interactions. And I think that's why I have a love/hate relationship with them. The escape is seductive. But I want to break out of that structure, and achieve the warm, comforting sort of ambiguity that you get with the less interactive mediums of writing and film (which in a way are more interactive, on a psychic level, because your participation as you're watching is not over-simplified).

I don't think my susceptibility to machine (or brick, or wood) intelligence means that I'm somewhat autistic or don't identify with human emotions. I was a counselor for five years, though that could have been my way of trying to explore and understand something foreign to me. I think the experience of causing one's self to disappear and focus on the issues of others and question and point out people's self-contradictions is something that could be closely-related to my interest in interactive art. But I think with computers and artificial intelligence (or my mathematically-impaired version of it, which is just something that looks human doing things semi-randomly) it allows me to put the objects of my psychological and anthropological interests in a safe box, so they can surprise me on my own terms. I need a better word than artificial intelligence, I think I'll just call it animism (or maybe animistic intelligence) since it's more about projecting than creating.

Recently my animation and installation work has been biographical, dealing with historical leaders such as Jim Jones, Moses, Darwin, and Slobodan Milosevic. But the biographies are mostly imaginary, and in their absurdity I'm making these real people artificial. Scientists (the installation artist Ken Feingold explores this in his work, too) said that artificial intelligence is more convincing when it's laced with non-sequiturs, and a little absurdity, and these portraits I've made are more convincing when they surprise you or do something the real version would not have done. I think animism might definitely be more appropriate here, since there's no math or programming at all, and so the name artificial intelligence just doesn't make any sense. And I think the religious implications of a term like animistic intelligence brings us back to my original point of me being fifteen and wondering why the games on my computer couldn't bring me into the pagan rituals of a Derek Jarman movie or Carlos Castaneda-inspired dreams of flying around and watching trees breathe, or whatever trees do.

Aaron Oldenburg, 2008

E-mail: pinothefrog at pulledhair dot com