THE WORDS WE USE: ENCODED?

The Words We Use: Encoded?, Gouache on paper, 56 x 76 cm, 2025

 

As tech companies and their PR departments work to market AI products and tools, various words are used to describe AI attributes. Many of these words are aspirational, but seemingly reassuring. If you have been reading about AI for some time, the words used to assure us human beings have ranged across multiple descriptions, for example, 'trusted AI', then 'trustworthy AI', 'safe AI', 'ethical AI', and most recently, 'agentic AI'. 

In my text-based painting, The Words We Use: Encoded?, I have painted binary code that 'instructs' words TRUSTED, TRUSTWORTHY, SAFE, AGENTIC, and ETHICAL, followed by AI. The code, and the painting's legend on the bottom left, are painted against a blue and cloudy sky-like background. Circles interlock as indicators of another kind of cloud, the techno-cloud. This fake cloud forms another skyscape, one comprised of signals, normally invisible, but pivotal for contemporary interconnectivity, and lightspeed transmission of data, instructions, and communications. A few of the circles disclose lightspeed with the scientific symbol for speed-of-light - c - painted repeatedly around their rims. The white code channels the appearance of fake angels.

By painting words as code - TRUSTED, TRUSTWORTHY, SAFE, AGENTIC, and ETHICAL - they are visualised (revealed) as simply variations of the same thing - code - rearrangements of zeros and ones. As visualised code in a list, the loss of nuance that exists between the meanings and feelings we human beings might attach to each word is clearly lost. While there are multiple forms of code used to configure algorithms, in this painting I am questioning whether human qualities of trust and agency, for example, can be encoded into AI, without them being algorithmic pastiche, merely applications rather than embedded (I won't say embodied, as that is another anthropomorphising word!) 

This comment has stuck with me:

In Passwords (2003), French cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard, describes a digitally coded destiny where it will be “possible to measure everything by the same extremely reductive yardstick: the binary, the alternation between 0 and 1”. (*) 

In, The Words We Use: Encoded?, my list of painted code visualises the 'reductive yardstick'.

More to say, but I will leave it here for you.

Cheers,

Kathryn

PS. I have many text-based paintings where I paint binary code, as a proxy for a depiction of reality. 

* Jean Baudrillard, Passwords, Trans. Chris Turner (London and NY: Verso, 2003), 76.