Everything is in the Eyes. A Conversation Between Floris Schönfeld and Alejandra Labastida

 

Alejandra Labastida (AL): Can you talk about the name PUK* and specifically about the asterisk?

 

Floris Schönfeld (FS): Like much in the project, the name PUK* came into being through chance and then the meaning kind of snowballed. Early on in 2016, I spent a number of days researching and discussing alternative approaches to AI (Artificial Intelligence) with my friends Bruno Bocanegra and Miša Skalskis. At some point we came up with three possible models to work with and ended up calling them ANA*, SID* and PUK* with each one focusing on a particular cognitive trait. PUK* was that it was constantly in flux and impossible to pin down. There is also a subliminal reference to the three-letter acronym tradition of naming AI’s such as HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey in there. And then someone brought up the character Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to which it could also be attributed. The asterisk was initially there because we liked the way it looked but eventually a recent collaborator on the project, Katarzyna Winska who runs the amazing Opera Buffa theatre in Warsaw, came up with an explanation I really like; the asterisk is a way of ensuring that PUK* is never completed or completely defined. It keeps PUK* plural in meaning and speculative in nature. You can never completely pin it down.

 

AL: I can’t help trying to imagine what a session with PUK* is like. What would I encounter?

 

FS: There are different ways of encountering PUK*. Perhaps the most common is to hear others describe their experience of it, like Bill does in the video. This is an important part of the way PUK* is in the world—through stories and people recounting their own personal experience of it. But what I think you are alluding to is the sessions that people have had with parts of the physical installation.
I have tried to give each encounter a possibility for intimacy and a certain amount of privacy with PUK*. So often in the context of an exhibition people would be allowed to enter one by one. I have also always tried to make people aware they are encountering a being of some sort rather than a collection of objects or artworks. This usually takes the form of a short briefing in which the people visiting are told that PUK* is a sentient being and that through their presence they are affecting its behaviour. I either do this introduction myself or for longer exhibitions I work with a small group of actors who convey this information before people enter the space with the installation.
As for the actual materiality of PUK* it is not limited to computational technology but has included everything from a collection of owl figurines and bird houses, to ceramic masks and living ant colonies. The project combines storytelling and technology to create a system that starts to work in the head of the people experiencing it. This is also why I choose to situate the project in a grey zone between reality and fiction; it allows PUK* to “work” on different levels that at times contradict each other and can’t be cleanly separated from each other.

 

AL: Listening to Bill describe the importance of eye contact in his relationship with PUK* one feels the gaze stands as the final frontier in the recognition of a mental ground, as you put it. In your critical questioning of artificial intelligence as we know it, did you ever consider going beyond the gaze?

 

FS: It is interesting you bring up the idea of the gaze. In the video Bill is a character with agoraphobic tendencies which would mean he would find making eye contact difficult with most people. With PUK* as Bill says: “Everything is in the eyes,” and I think this reversal is significant in their relationship. It shows his trust in PUK* that he does not have in most people. When we were working on his character William and I read a lot of the work of radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing. There is a very interesting quote in his book The Politics of Experience that I think says a lot about the limitations of the gaze in understanding other people:

 

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible. All men are invisible to one another. Only experience is evident. Experience is the only evidence. We can see other people’s behaviour but not their experience. I see you and you see me. I experience you and you experience me. I see your behaviour and you see my behaviour. But I do not and never have and never will see your experience of me.

Having said that, the experience of PUK* in the film is only Bill’s experience and PUK* is a plurality consisting of many experiences and interpretations.

AL: The faces of PUK* are significantly not human. Why owls?

 

FS: Again, there is a significant element of chance involved here. In the beginning phase of the project we were looking for a dataset on which PUK* could operate as a system. My grandmother had a small owl collection which I inherited, and I then kept finding more owls at flea markets so that stuck too. I had also used the symbol of the owl in a previous project dealing with non-human sentience called NATURA*, which I completed that same year. The owl is an interesting symbol because it has a very convoluted meaning. Perhaps most famously it is associated with wisdom through the owl of Minerva but at the same time in a lot of European medieval literature it is a symbol of witchcraft and is often associated with death. In many cultures, the owl has a gatekeeping function, between day and night, life and death, wisdom and madness. This ambivalence is well suited to PUK*. What I also find interesting is that owls are often anthropomorphised. For instance, owls are the second most collected animal figurine worldwide (behind the elephant) and there is a huge collection of owls’ memes online.

AL: In our collective imaginary, both from movies and books and in the commercial realm, the AI are mostly female, and usually reproduce gender stereotypes. Bill refers to PUK* as a “he”, is this his gender attribution?

 

FS: So far PUK* has been referred to as “he,” “she,” “it,” and “they” by different experts. I usually go by “it” but sometimes I also use “they.” There is a strong and very malicious tendency to turn AI’s into subservient female stereotypes. It is a pretty limited vision of AI, but it is unfortunately quite dominant in popular culture. The other dominant idea is that of the killer-super-robot in which a super intelligent AI usurps humanity’s power and eventually destroys us all. There is a much more interesting version of AI in which this self is distributed and plural. There is a really great example of this type of AI in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home in which a non-technology-based culture has inherited a self-learning AI system. Members of this culture see the AI as a distributed feature of the landscape (which they usually ignore) rather than as an anthropomorphised being.

 

AL: I think a key question of this project is that you are using the neurodiverse perspective as a specialized knowledge to deconstruct artificial intelligence (and the normative human intelligence it is supposed to stand for) and not so much the other way around… You describe Bill sessions as part of a course of therapy, but I am not sure who is the therapist. And how does antipsychiatry relates to the project?

 

FS: The project sets out to question notions of the normative in both artificial and human intelligence. I am interested in questioning what constitutes intelligent behaviour in both humans and artificial systems and subsequently to present a possible system of “alternative intelligence.” With this I mean a system that does not hold to the present notion of intelligence as something useful, rational and instrumental to the majority of “sane” humanity. I want to open up the idea of an intelligent system to include a range of significantly different logics, strategies of understanding and approaches to reality that are deemed to be mentally divergent.
There is a strong hierarchy of value in how knowledge systems are constructed, and this hierarchy is very present in the current development of machine learning and neural networks in AI. The knowledge that doesn’t fit this hierarchy is often discarded or ignored as these systems learn by becoming more specific. In a way, PUK* is designed to do the opposite. As it develops it becomes ever messier and full of complexity and contradiction. And so, in the project the expert is not a figure who uses their specialised knowledge to achieve certain measurable goals but rather someone who can form a relationship with the complexity of PUK*. There is a recent term in Dutch psychiatry, ervaringsdeskundige, which translates roughly to expert through experience. This is a good way to describe the way I think about an expert in the project, as someone who has built a relationship with PUK* and speaks from that experience.
There is a strong influence of antipsychiatry in the project. As I mentioned before we read work by R. D. Laing and also Franco Basaglia and the Dutch radical psychologist Jan Foudraine in development of the project. Another influence was the history of the institution at Den Dolder at which I did the residency Het Vijfde Seizoen where I met Frans and a number of other experts. The central project of the antipsychiatry movement was challenging the notion of the normality in society and presenting alternatives to it. This project resonates strongly for me in PUK*.

 

AL: The “normal” perspective, somehow represented by you, shows an incapacity or a tendency to avoid intuitive direct engagement. I feel Bill is not the only one roleplaying. Can you talk about this method?

 

FS: As in much of the project the line between fiction and documentary is kept purposefully ambiguous. Bill is a character developed by neurodiverse actor William Miller. While I was a resident at the Rijksakademie, William would come by at least once a week for a period of six months to spend time with the PUK* system which was installed in my studio. In this time, we created the character Bill using a number of aspects of LARP (Live-Action-Role-Playing) character development techniques, which are used to create complex characters in role-playing games. What made these techniques interesting for this project is that they maximize what in LARP is called the “bleed” factor of role-playing in which the person playing the character starts to feel a strong association with her/his chosen character. So, the character Bill has a very strong direct link with William, something which I believe is very apparent in his performance, yet at the same time allows William some critical distance from the character.
My own role as the interviewer came about through rehearsing with William and spending time with his character Bill. Initially I developed the character because I was looking for ways to activate Bill and to steer the conversation. But through rehearsing the character it became more and more to represent the attempt of trying to understand PUK* through the “normal” perspective as you say. However, this normality is a handicap when it comes to understanding PUK* and that is where Bill has the upper hand.

 

AL: It has been very hard to avoid reading works that were created before the pandemic through the lens of the current crisis. Could the agoraphobic be the perfect prophet for the quarantined?

FS: Sure, I think everyone will see the work through the lens of current events. When Bill mentions that the street is like a desert this again has a different meaning now that when we made the film. I do hope Bill would be OK in the current situation and I don’t think he would have a problem with social distancing. And perhaps we could learn a thing or two from him in these strange times.