[-empyre-] Towards a drift in values? (part 2/3)

[Maurice Benayoun]

Sorry for having been a bit long on drawing the local background, but
it may shed light on the following considerations.
We can observe that, with some similarities with Taiwan, Singapore and
Korea, and at another scale, with China. In these countries, the
collective implication of individual behavior is always considered as
a priority and it affects the management of the crisis, being a
political crisis or a sanitary crisis.

This leads naturally to some aspects of my most recent research.
During the past years, I have been exploring two apparently antagonist
concepts:

“Sublimation” understood as the discretization of the real, from the
calculus, the character, the word, the atom, to the digit. In a
nutshell, the quantification and the translation of the world in a
form of representation that can only be recognized or understood by
natural or artificial brains.
The sublimation process allows the treatment of data freed from
materiality. This leads to the construction of a form of absolute
knowledge inclusive of the physical and the biological world, humans
with all related data, social life, health condition, and opinions.

“Reification”: taken literally and later conceptually extended in
Marxist theory by Lukacs (in "Reification and the Consciousness of the
Proletariat," as part of his book History and Class Consciousness),
and also by Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle). Literally,
“Reification” from the Latin res, the thing, can be understood as
“thingification”, “commodification”, the conversion of abstraction
into an object.

Stemming from a simple idea that the artist should be the one giving
shape to ideas, The Brain Factory project, developed together with Dr.
Tobias Klein, is conceived as a tool, an instrument, to make possible
the conversion of thoughts, abstractions, into shapes and then into
objects.

Both processes operate at once, Sublimation of the thought into data.
Then morphogenesis of though by applying forcefields to particles
until their organization is validated by the “Brain Worker” (the
exhibition visitor equipped with an EEG headband) as an acceptable
representation of the concept, an abstract word proposed by the
neuro-design station.
At the end of the process, the abstraction is reified when the 3D
model generated by the station is printed out as a 3D object.
PEACE, POWER, MONEY, SPACE, DESIRE, have been reified by thousands of
visitors during the different shows (QUT Museum Brisbane), Laval
Virtual (France), Bains Numériques, (Enghien, France), Art Center Nabi
(Seoul, S. Korea), Microwave Festival (HK)…

In June 2019, we presented, with Dr. Nicolas Mendoza, an additional
contributor, blockchain expert, a significant evolution of the Brain
Factory project:
Value of Values, Speculative Speculations on Values.
After a similar neuro-design process, the Brain Workers produce a 3D
model, a token, that is immediately registered on the blockchain. Each
Brain Worker receives 2 tokens as a remuneration for their
contribution. They designed the first one, and inspired, through the
concept DNA, the second one resulting from the experience of the next
visitor working on the same value (LOVE, FAME, MONEY, COMPASSION,
EQUALITY, STRENGTH, INTEGRITY…)
Human abstractions are now limited to human values, at the end of the
process, the brain worker can automatically get a crypto-wallet and
accept the tokens. If you get PEACE0320, you can collect it, barter it
for another token like MONEY0987, or even sell it.
During the production process, visitors follow the canonical statutes
of the Art World: coming as an art exhibition spectator, they become
successively an artist, giving shape to ideas, a curator assessing the
work during the process, then a collector and eventually an art
dealer.