The second in the Singular Plural Plural Singular series takes Berlin-based Rimini Protokoll’s  Uncanny Valley as its starting point. It shapes the introspective, methodical and critical questions that arise from quotations – from Perihan Mağden to al-Jazari, from Mohammad Salemy to Adam Greenfield – around the practices of Hito Steyerl, Wesley Goatley, Holly Herndon and Egemen Demirci. Many of the references in this open-ended discussion, which moves between body and soul, robots and us, artificial intelligence and Google, the domestic and the national, are Berlin-based, while its final stop is Korea.

I am in the palliative care unit of a newly opened hospital in the city where I was born. Sentences from Perihan Mağden’s novel The Companion come back to me years later: “Fear grows like a stain. Sometimes, for unexpected reasons, it recedes, narrows, shrinks; but it is always there.”

This time I am the companion, and helplessness stands before me in the form of myself. We are neither setting off on a long sea voyage as in the book, nor is my sibling twelve years old, yet, just as in the novel, the oddities of everyday life, states of emergency and unexpected situations are all around us. Another quote from the novel:

I reach out to stroke her hair. I can’t do it. I pull back quickly, before she notices. Bodily dialogue has always sat awkwardly on me. Like the ball gown of a tall, shapely stepsister, it hangs off me here and there. I start talking again. I am one of those who can express themselves only through words – I am crippled.

While Sena listens to a healing prayer playing on YouTube, I massage her feet with the Smart Cream Viron gave me. As I think about phenomena such as listening to a prayer from a machine, prayers circulating on the Internet and digital prayer-bead counters, I see – through the door left open – a very young imam, almost a child, passing by in the corridor. He is at least as real as the painting by the child prodigy (in The Companion), Execution of a Chinese Man Eating a Panda. I read Spinoza’s sentence “Every living being strives to persevere in its own being” together with a line from A.I., Steven Spielberg’s portrait of a postmodern Pinocchio (Artificial Intelligence: AI, 2001):

Until you were born, robots didn’t dream; they didn’t desire anything unless we told them what to want. Do you have any idea what a success story you’ve become? You found a fairy tale and, inspired by love, fueled by desire, you set out to make it real.

The way every recorded performance eventually becomes a repetition that will loop; the possibility that every repetition transforms the one who records it; and the myth of God breathing His spirit into the world and the living beings He created – all of this makes me think of Rimini Protokoll’s Uncanny Valley (Unheimliches Tal), which I watched twice in a row. Over its long-running practice, the Berlin-based collective has combined the language of documentary theater with experts from different fields, approaches to form and the possibilities of media, producing plays built on real-life testimonies, interventions in space, temporary stages, eclectic installations and radio readings. Now celebrating its twentieth year, the trio questions various layers of interaction, knowledge transfer, communication and interactive technology in its work. Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel, who met while studying at the University of Giessen, have realized their individual or joint productions under the name Rimini Protokoll since 2002. The collective’s only point in common with the other Rimini Protocol (2003) – proposed by geologist Colin Campbell, also known as the Uppsala Protocol and aimed at stabilizing oil prices – is retired politicians. They were the strongest supporters of Campbell’s proposal. Throughout its career, Rimini Protokoll has worked with many different social groups, variables and demographic profiles, such as Formula One drivers, pets and their owners, radio waves and teenagers; the content of its project Best Before, supported by video game technology, was shaped with the participation of politicians who had left active politics.

Uncanny Valley is a one-person play. In the lead role is an animatronic copy of the writer Thomas Melle: an electro-mechanical puppet that has “learned” his facial expressions, gestures and mannerisms one-to-one. Its face, its hands, its every movement have been modeled on Melle, copied and produced. The writer, who has been diagnosed with manic depression, wants no other cares or worries in his life besides his writing practice and his mental health. Working with director Stefan Kaegi of Rimini Protokoll, he produces an impressive, autobiographical and experimental text. This robot, the writer’s copy, travels in place of the writer – who does not feel very comfortable at the social events his profession requires, from book signings to book launches – and tells the writer’s story just as it has been programmed to. From the writer’s adolescence to the making of the robot, the most fundamental reference of Uncanny Valley, which is built on Melle’s story, is Alan Turing, regarded as the founder of computer language. Turing, who worked for the British military and after whom awards have been named for his breakthroughs in cracking German communication codes during World War II, is one of the pioneers of computer science. His death is shrouded in mystery; his body, gradually transformed by hormones, can be read in the black-and-white photographs he left behind. Interweaving episodes from Melle’s life with Turing’s tragic story, this performance also reformulates one of the oldest subjects in art history, the question of “the original and the copy”: As robots, with their flawless performance, free us from the work we find tedious, are they also filling us with the fear that one day they will inevitably take our places?

Adding a human likeness to a moving puppet made of cables, electronic chips, sensors, software and algorithms is bound up with the politics of representation, with the way humans perceive the world and with our urge to place ourselves at the center of the universe. The Sistine Chapel, the painting of the Creation. Humanoid (human-like) is a term used for that which resembles a human without being one; for things that are not themselves human but have a human appearance. Its earliest recorded use runs parallel to colonial history: European colonizers used it to describe Indigenous peoples and fossils that were morphologically similar, but not identical. While Elon Musk ponders how to colonize Mars, NASA has begun developing a program, population planning and a debate on ethical values for the humanoid robots it will send into space.

@Rimini Protokol

Türkiye’s first humanoid robots are being produced about 110 km from the hospital room where I am writing this. Based in Konya, AKINROBOTICS and AKINSOFT is an organization that employs around 150 people and describes itself as “the first humanoid robot factory in Türkiye and the world.” Can we explain its relationship to Boston Dynamics through Tülin Şahin and Cindy Crawford, or Coca-Cola and Cola Turca? AKINROBOTICS, which made headlines when its Akıncı-4 model fell off the stage at the Mediterranean IT Summit, has a boundless vision for the future: it plans to produce “robot soldiers” for national defense. Most recently, at the Wedding Fair held last January at Istanbul’s Lütfi Kırdar Convention and Exhibition Center, it introduced its project Robot Ada, a robot that carries a henna tray, sings folk songs and belly dances.

In 2018, speaking at the Safer Internet Day events (February 5), Minister of Maritime Affairs, Communications and Transport Ahmet Arslan grew angry at Robot Sanbot, with which he was sharing the stage, after it interrupted him and said, “What are you saying? I don’t understand,” and he asked for it to be removed from the stage. Sanbot, developed by a Chinese company, was later reprogrammed and apologized to Arslan via a private television channel. Pure Cem Yılmaz: “So will Zeki Müren be able to see us too?”

Dr. Özgür Akın, Chairman of the Board of AKINROBOTICS and AKINSOFT, speaking on the subject, had brought a “domestic and national” sensitivity to the humanoid debate:

At the event, the interruption of the Minister of Transport’s speech by the robot, and the minister’s subsequent warnings that someone intervene with the robot, did not make for a pleasant sight in today’s era of digital transformation. This unpleasant incident also sparked debate that the use of a foreign-made robot, far removed from our customs and culture, may have stemmed from an admiration for things foreign… While I hope this incident will be the last bad example once again demonstrating the necessity of turning to Turkish engineers and domestic production, as the chief engineer of Türkiye’s domestic robotics company I can say with peace of mind that we have the potential to meet the demand for robotic technology at every event in our country.

Yet al-Jazari, born in 1153 in Mesopotamia and regarded as the father of cybernetics, had in fact designed the first robots in history with his inventions of an automatic clock, water pumps and an automatic ablution machine. In Kitâb fî marifeti’l-hiyeli’lhendesiyye (The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices), al-Jazari describes these devices together with his drawings, explaining one by one, along with a timeline, how all the parts are to be made, how they are assembled and how they work:

I examined the books of the scholars who came long before me and the works of those who followed them… At last I freed myself from mere transmission, broke away from what others had done and was able to look at the problems with my own eyes… I saw that every technical science that cannot be put into practice remains suspended between truth and error.

Hito Steyerl, who exposed the links between the biennial’s sponsor and the arms industry through her participation in the 13th Istanbul Biennial, asks in her film Robots Today (2016) how computer technologies are used in new war strategies. Referring to the Cizre-born polymath al-Jazari, she puts questions to Siri, the iPhone software:

– Who destroyed this city, Siri?
– I’m not sure I understand you.

During the production of this video work by Steyerl, who lives and works in Berlin, I had the opportunity to meet researcher Abdullah Yaşın, founder of the Private Cizre İsmail Ebul-İz El Cezeri Museum, which has made it its mission to preserve al-Jazari’s legacy in Cizre, and author of The Great Kurdish Inventor İsmail Ebul-İz of Cizre. Recalling Robots Today now, on the occasion of Rimini Protokoll, takes me back in my mind to an exhibition I saw recently. Researcher and artist Wesley Goatley, who examines the effects of data and artificial intelligence on our understanding of the world through his sound-based installations and lecture performances, lives and works in London. His sound installation project Chthonic Rites (2018), re-presented site-specifically in the exhibition Interstitial Spaces, which opened as part of Berlin’s CTM festival, is designed as a conversation between Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. The installation follows a strategy that uses the ability of Alexa and Siri – what we might think of as “smart PAs” (smart personal assistants) – to talk to each other in order to expose the ideologies, problematics and unknowns behind their design, circulation, functions and operations. Exploring the complex relationships of artificial intelligence (AI) with the politics of power – premodern ones included – in many different contexts, from banquet culture to the organization of daily life, this presentation also raises new questions about the notions of friendship, companionship and conversation.

In his book Radical Technologies (Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life), which I couldn’t put down last year, Adam Greenfield speaks of how “time is now chopped into slices between notifications” and, basing his argument on the global clash between Silicon Valley and the way the world currently works, describes “the colonization of everyday life by information processing.” Today, even the seemingly most transgressive visions of technology in everyday life invariably veer back into the familiar patterns of capital investment, the extraction of ever-increasing value and endless exploitation: “We don’t even talk about progress anymore; it has been replaced by ‘innovation.’”

There are also those who remain hopeful about new technologies. For her latest album Proto, released last May and labeled an “AI baby,” whose singles Godmother and Eternal play constantly on my playlist, Holly Herndon worked with her partner Mat Dryhurst and AI specialist Jules LaPlace (whom I actually got to know during the production of Hito Steyerl’s works, and with whom I shared a studio at UdK). While teaching Spawn, the AI program developed for the album, how to interpret voices, they drew on live studies with the vocalists they worked with, vocal warm-up exercises and endless folk songs. For joining a Twitter argument between Grimes and Zola Jesus – even though that tweet was later deleted – she was declared “a silicon fascist and the voice of privilege” by Zola Jesus. The reason all hell suddenly broke loose in the world of experimental music was this simple question: Will artificial intelligence replace musicians in the future? Herndon, an American musician living in Berlin, takes an optimistic view of this question:

AI tools will not replace skilled musicians, but the possibilities of drum machines can be multiplied. So the issue is the drums, not the drummers. Technology and the ideal of automation can together provide a more humane production environment. AI can be used to evolve toward an ‘interconnected’ model of music. Instead of hyper-individualized successes, we can be coordinated and independent.

In his presentation titled “Portrait of the Artist as a Living Algorithm” at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Berlin-based artist and curator Mohammad Salemy, one of the founders of The New Centre for Research and Practice, examines contemporary art’s problematic relationships with algorithms, artificial intelligence and the Internet, posing one important and critical question after another: Can an artist’s work be thought of as an algorithm, or at least be compared with other algorithmic processes? What kinds of methodologies are needed to reveal the algorithmic logic of contemporary art and to erase its “original,” human-centered self-image? Can we redefine the figure of the artist as a living algorithm, in an ontological context?

The last piece of research to be added to this open-ended field of discussion is a series of works titled Call to Action (CTA series), shown in the exhibition The Influencing Machine, which opened toward the end of 2018 at NgbK in Kreuzberg – Berlin’s “democratic Kunstverein,” whose members meet once a year to decide on its exhibition and event program. Starting from our increasingly symbiotic relationship with the phones and tablets that, according to Greenfield, have taken hold of us, Egemen Demirci problematizes the notion of “the ownership of our screens.” Screens are not only spaces of computing, information and communication; they are also commercial, economic spaces that are up for sale. In his installation proposal, panes of glass 1 mm “thin,” chosen in the most commonly used dimensions of mobile devices, are printed and arranged according to Google Ads’ strategies of size, color and expression. These designs, produced as glass prints, function almost like a fake button for the viewer, who is confronted with their own user identity. The colors, typographic play and propositions relate to the advertising, listing and campaign spaces we encounter on the Internet, while the readings, references and concepts they bring in draw inspiration from philosophy, art theory and ontology. According to Demirci, “limitation is the key to control.” The titles proposed by this series are meaningful for the reader as a way of rethinking the ever-changing values of the virtual world, as are the sections into which it classifies the questions it problematizes: Absolute Transparency, Convert to Material, Tap into the Anthroporeal, Negative Participation, Panic of Emancipation, Impossible to Avoid Identification, What if there is nothing on the other side? and – my favorite among them – Human Values…

How do we define human values? Toward the end of Uncanny Valley, Thomas Melle, appearing in the projection, suddenly begins to talk to his robot copy; although he cannot use his leg with the same 360-degree flexibility it has, he wants to reclaim his face, his voice and his expressions: This is mine… My voice… My face… Is this still me? This moment reminded me of a reality show full of dramatic moments that I recently watched online. TV producers used virtual reality to “reunite” a child who had died in 2016, at just seven years old, with her mother, who grieved for her constantly. With the help of VR, Jang Ji-sung saw her daughter Nayeon in a park they had often visited together while she was alive, and the father and the other siblings in the studio watched her performance live on air.

It seems we will never be able to answer the question “Is the body a prison or a pair of wings?” Robots, artificial intelligence and algorithms show us once again the limits of our bodies, our minds and our interaction with the world. Sooner or later we accept that we are made of flesh and bone, and that one day we will surely succumb to the fatigue of our material, to gravity and to time. To return to the beginning of this text, that quote from Mağden’s The Companion, mingling with a line from the final scene of Spielberg’s A.I., might console us, if only a little: “Everyone is granted a certain quota of crying at birth; the sooner you use it up, the better.”

“David, you are the enduring memory of the human race…”

Misal Adnan Yıldız

This text was originally published on unlimited .