Is language a false witness? Is promise information? Exploring the techno-politics of the voice, friendship, counter-information and war, Jessika Khazrik’s composition ‘Only Distance Has a Name .x. Artificial Intelligence Is Work’ attempts to ceremonially subvert the premise of AI as labor that extimately auto-denies itself in alchemical rationalizations. This composition was premiered live in 9-channels at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2018 as part of ‘The Exhaustion Project’ curated by Abhijan Toto.  

Recently, the voice has been presented as an agnotologically ubiquitous yet impossible biometric, that could exponentially be replicated through resources as easily accessible as seconds of recorded speech. If singularity is denied to the voice as matter, then what is the promised multiplicity abundant under artificial intelligence as a recognitive accumulation that feigns what is being said yet learns and teaches, most often us secretly? This AI-aided performative composition is conceived, laboured up and trained out of these questions.

Through the statement “Artificial Intelligence Is Work”, the second act grapples with AI as a division, distribution and re-arrangement of labor with a cryptographic and alchemical core. Rather than abolishing work as advanced in the endless dream of automation, the increasing spread of AI creates new forms of work and learning i.e., a re-distribution of labor, alienations and a re-organization of knowledge.

If we look at the ethics purported by some strands of machine learning that build its datasets from data shared by users online, collated and re-used in hidden network architectures and inferences without their explicit knowledge or from images collated by surveillance cameras of pedestrians and passers by that happen to be crossing a monitored environment, we see that so far with Artificial Intelligence – and specifically within machine learning, the tautological statement that ‘everything computable becomes work (whether you know it or not)’ holds a greater truth value than ‘work will become obsolescent’. Can an incomputable cryptography exist?
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Jessika Khazrik (b. 1991 Beirut, based between Beirut and Berlin) is an artist, technologist, electronic music producer and writer whose indisciplinary practice ranges from composition to ecotoxicology, machine learning, cryptography, performance, visual art and history of science and music. Khazrik holds BAs in Linguistics and in Theatre from the Lebanese University and a MS in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT where she was awarded the Ada Lovelace prize. In 2012-13, she was a fellow at Home Workspace Program in Ashkal Alwan, in 2018-19, a fellow at the Digital Earth and in 2020, guest faculty at HfK Bremen. While concurrently working as technologist and researcher in different collective and institutional settings, her work has been presented at The Normandy Landfill, the Stanford Research Institute, CTM Festival, the Arab Image Foundation, Kunsthalle Wien, Les Urbaines, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Times Museum Guangzhou, LUMA Foundation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Amnesty International, Center of Documentary Arts and Research at UC Santa Cruz, her house, the internet, secrets and Theater der Welt, among others.

Jessika Khazrik - Only Distance Has a Name .x. Artificial Intelligence Is Work

Spaces of Faux Intimacies is the first part of a series of interventions unfolding over a year, exploring intimacy in the wake of socially distanced capitalism, digital technologies and the pandemic. 

Today’s neoliberal, hyper-connected society, has capitalised the very notion of intimacy. Screened semblances of emotional abundance are promised to us within only a few swipes away while corporate conglomerates are profiting from our desire for physical and emotional connections. As the pandemic and the accompanying social distancing measures are driving us even further apart, and amid the already existing turbulence around the world, how can we work together to produce new channels of care, social resilience, and affective solidarity? 

"Spaces of faux intimacies" brings together artists of various disciplines to contribute to the discussion with individually commissioned auditory works.

Curated by Katerina Gnafaki for Centrum

The exhibition is part of the Vorspiel program of the CTM and transmediale festival 2021 and made possible with the generous support of Musikfonds, by means of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.