Touchstone

Ivana Bašić Caitlin Cherry Zack Davis Jo Nigoghossian Andrew Ross Vincent Tiley

American Medium is pleased to present Touchstone, an exhibition of sculpture and painting. These artists are exploring the human condition; employing traditional art-making practices, contemporary technology, and a sensitivity to the anthropomorphic aesthetics these tools have acquired. The artworks in Touchstone orbit around the concept of the noosphere “…[an] imagining, in one way or another, above the animal biosphere, a human sphere, a sphere of reflection, a conscious invention, of conscious souls,” - Telihard de Chardin, “Hominization” (1923).

In the context of this exhibition de Chardin’s “soul” can be taken to mean self-awareness or sentience. The artworks, though inanimate, possess qualities familiar to animals, humans - and more recently - to neural networks, and artificial intelligences. These objects were gifted self awareness by their makers and allowed to reflect themselves. They are present, purposeful, and knowledgeable, yet obviously inhuman. Although composed of familiar elements populating our everyday, these artworks seem to beckon to a world beyond our senses.

In the Turing test, a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior becomes indistinguishable from that of a human. It is in our mind that an AI becomes human; it is in the viewer’s mind that these artworks become animate. From collections of steel, glass, resin, and pigment, a “soul” emerges. These artworks are reminders that there are touchstones used to interpret reality other than those we are most familiar with. In the words of the scholar Graham Harvey, "...the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human.”