The seemingly sudden emergence of artificial intelligence into our everyday reality has unsettled many – but not Illma Gore.
“We are entering a new era,” she says. “What an exciting time to be an artist. What a cool time to be making shit.”
The Brisbane and LA-based artist is known for her provocations and is no stranger to controversy, from tattooing the names of thousands of strangers on to her body, to being sued by Marilyn Manson for her role in documenting claims of his sexual abuse, to painting Donald Trump having a very small penis.
But the work she will create for the Brisbane street art festival is, on its surface at least, far more bucolic than all that.
In Artistic Visions of a Brighter Future a small boy sits among grass and wildflowers, his bare feet dangling above a stream as he pencils his homework into a bound paper book. Dappled in warm yellow sunlight beside the boy is a dog – of a sort.
This is no flesh and blood canine but Boston Dynamics’ Spot, described in one Washington Post headline as “the $74,500 robot dog of our dystopian dreams”.
But Gore is bored of a dystopia dreamed up by artists like Mike Winkelmann, or Beeple, whose work features dismembered human body parts branded with serial numbers and attached to electronic machinery and giant robotic avatars of tech billionaires being worshipped like deities.
Gore gets that people are scared.
“We have so many issues with climate and capitalism, the American government and the two-party system is absolutely fucked, everyone’s angry,” she says.
Though born and raised in Brisbane – her developer father, Mike Gore, was one of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s infamous “white-shoe brigade” – Gore’s mother was from the US and the artist moved to California at the age of 20.
She has more first-hand experience of the anger and dysfunction circulating in the US than most Australians.
After her infamous nude Trump portrait she was suspended from Facebook, hounded with death threats – even physically attacked.
Gore recently returned to her home city – a place she says has “grown so much creatively the last 10 years” – for a break from the US, describing the moment her plane touched down as a “huge relief”.
“America is like a third-world country driving a Porsche,” Gore says. “It’s quite intense at the moment.”
It’s not just legislatively that we, as a society, are lagging the rapid advance of technology, Gore believes, but emotionally.
Which explains why, as an artist, Gore is excited.
“Imagine looking back at the 21st century in history and being like: ‘this is right before we had AI and robots fully integrated into society, what art were they making?’,” she says.
For a decidedly contemporary artist, Gore is acutely aware of their place in history. And she believes we’ve been here before.
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What were the fireside discussions when the wheel was invented, Gore asks – “kids these days and their wheels, they got it so easy”.
And just as Andy Warhol’s soup cans came to visually define the era of US mass production, Gore can’t help but wonder what the great thinkers, writers and creators of the past would have made of the rapidly emerging future in which we find ourselves.
What would Diogenes the Cynic, who so scorned the superficiality of his fellow Athenians that he dressed in rags and lived in a barrel in the agora, what would Diogenes have thought of the selfie generation and how would he have performed his ripostes?
What would Mary Cassatt and Frida Kahlo have made of the evolution of femininity?
What timeless phrases could Shakespeare have conjured with lol, rizz and our endless stream of slang and buzzwords?
Gore’s far from alone in grappling with the emotional significance of this moment in history – she’s not even the first artist to play with a Boston Dynamics’ robotic dog.
Art and marketing collective MSCHF bought themselves a Spot and mounted a paintball gun on it, in what Gore describes as a valid conversation around the militarisation of robotics.
But far fewer are those committed to imagining a future with robotics and artificial intelligence that “all just works”.
Because Gore, a techno-optimist like Agnieszka Pilat – who trained Boston Dynamics’ dogs in the art of portraiture – believes things can be bad and still be getting better at the same time.
“There will be new jobs, there will be new stuff to do,” she says.
Is Gore being naive? That is a question that, for now, not even artificial intelligence can answer.
“I am an AI language model and do not have the ability to interpret the behaviour or state of mind of individuals,” was ChatGPT’s response.
But then, if the program was intent upon world domination, it would say that, wouldn’t it?
Gore’s is one of nine temporary artworks being installed in the Queen Street Mall for the street art festival which also includes permanent works being put up on walls around the city.
