Uli Ap ©artist

Richard Bright: Can we begin by you saying something about your background?

Uli Ap: I live a dual life between New York and London and love making projects in Japan very much, indeed.

I have a dual virtual body and multiple skins, that recently multiplied up to five at a time.

I spent my formative years in my father’s scientific lab located at the basement of the art museum. So, the earliest black and green computers collided in my consciousness with large-scale paintings. I went to dance school and figure skating. However, was removed from them both by the forces outside of my early life control, and joined the art school, where I wasn’t quite satisfied with something and, therefore, was rigorously writing fiction and journalism in multiple editorials. To become a rockstar, I studied architecture. I, indeed, graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture [the AA] in London.

Alien AI at Goldsmiths, London

RB: What is the underlying focus of your work? In particular, what are the thinking processes and knowledge practices that guide your artistic research?

UA: At the moment, my artistic research is based on life. This embraces technological emergency, social and cultural constructs. My strong desire is to erase all labels and definitions, immerse people into the notion that we are all One. I’d love everyone to be free to live and move anywhere we want without need to confront the artificially created border crossing, humiliating passport control, and, especially, without the devastating dangers of wars and environmental disasters.

From my alien point of view, as soon as every one of us would realise that we are all One, wars would cease to exist as there would be no reason for … In a state of awareness that we are all One, we equally unite with all sorts of intelligences: human, alien, animal, machine… Then, natural and constructed worlds would merge. This would also revert the climate disaster as when we all One we all equally care.

Alien AI at Goldsmiths, London

I’m hugely disturbed by the growing multiplication of conflicts and diminishing of life value. At the age of super conscious machines and technology penetration of the aspects of everyone’s everywhere it feels unthinkable of happening.

It feels that, in spite of the most popular concerns, technology is not the worst enemy of humanity – humans are the worst enemies to themselves.

We do live at the state of the extreme technological emergency – whether it would destroy or elevate the human world – is to be determined by the human actions and use of those potentially dangerous developments. Essentially, they are all tools that require actions to be actuated…

RB: Have there been any particular influences to your ideas and work?

UA: They are very diverse from science and engineering to architecture, technology, film / moving image, writing, performance, music, dance and, obviously, visual and electronic art. I don’t think anyone ever influenced my ideas, as I feel ideas belong to the realms of a personal abstract or visionary matter, but the strength to realise them through various practices and personalities – definitely, yes.

dual VR glitchedBody

RB: You have stated that your work explores a cross-reality zone between virtual, physical, and mental spaces. Also, you state that you “believe in a world with no borders and no identity”. Can you explain what you mean by a ‘cross-reality zone’ is and the notion of ‘no borders’ and ‘no identity’?

UA: Cross-reality zone belongs to the era of the Brain AI. The term was coined by Joseph A. Paradiso at MIT Responsive Environments group and James A. Landay. The theory is based on sensor networks that merge physical and virtual worlds. I added mental worlds there as this was a direction I was travelling into.

My interests constantly change and evolve as I search for new and even more new horizons and embrace more and more anti-disciplinarity. I’m excited about the state of urgency and emergency and opening up new perspectives and heading in the directions unknown, which no one explored yet and which I choose to peruse by some internal drives, at times unknown even to myself, till I reach them. In general, I want to achieve fluidity where everything constantly morphs, transforms, transitions. Where nothing is ever permanent or static, but everything is in a constant motion.

It is also when one simultaneously experiences virtual / digital, physical and imaginary spaces / situations / constructs. I tend to disorient people between all layers: the ones they have access to and the ones they don’t. It is a state where identities are fluid and borders are no longer possible. I translate this into virtual and physical or metaphysical, personal and political or collective lives.

I tend to create controversial or provocative situations and expansive projects that avoid any categorization and are being recognised as such by experimental arts awards. I tried to convince myself to create something that I can just put into a gallery and go, but in reality, I never stop and then notice myself all immersed in another huge project that expands outside of my human control and I delegate it to the alien to deal with. I guess, it’s happening because I love space very much and, to me, an artwork exists in space, not just in one dimension whatever it is.

The provocation I construct includes collision of ideas, experiences, knowledges, practices, technologies, mediums and media that habitually don’t go together. Somehow, I’ve always been this way, even in a high school writing unthinkable research papers that tended to receive some kind of innovation and bravery awards or as a child inventing an infinite planet of ice-cream and party, where all kids could travel to on a cloud when parents sleep at night. Fascinating part of these adventures was that I managed to convince everyone that they all forgot our night experiences and it was only me who could remember them. Guess what: it made me the most popular kid in a group as everyone expected my arrival with new stories each morning!

One day, I told my little brother – somewhere at the time when you realise that Santa Clause is your dad with a beard made from some kind of a bath sponge and not a mythical creature coming through the chimney with a bag of presents – that I invented the Planet and he was crying. He told that he really believed that the planet existed. I feel this summarise my art practice pretty well. Impossible inventions that everyone believes in.

That Side Where Real Is & Vertical Immersion (Photo: Maria Andrews)

That Side Where Real Is & Vertical Immersion, St Marks, Kennington, London

RB: Your project, THAT SIDE WHERE REAL IS, involves 9 site-specific immersive Installations which challenge our perceptions of reality. Can you say more about these projects and the ways it challenges perceptions of reality?

UA: This is my key project at the time. Steve Coulson, the vicar of St Mark’s Kennington [across the Oval tube station], still kindly keeps one of the installations [Vertical Immersion that was one of five highlights at the Art Licks Weekend 2014] at the crypt – please, come to visit! The reality there is distorted and whatever you perceive is not what it is. St Mark’s is the place of the birth of The cReature and in a way is my first performance.

The cReature Film (still)

During the building of the installation, I called my grandmother on my way to a post office to pick up samples of stones for the installation to discover next day that this conversation happened to be our last encounter. Traumatised by a sudden death of the dearest human to me on this planet Earth, whom this work is dedicated to, I decided that The cReature is going to exit the TV screen [step out The cReature Film] at the cemetery of broken TV sets, which would make the artist to be absent. I just couldn’t face the fact that there would be an opening and everything that comes with it. Artistically, it was the time of the hyper hype of Marina Abramović ‘The Artist is Present’ at the MoMa.

The cReature in That Side Where Real Is.

RB: In projects such as Staircase (2013), Talk to Me (2013) and White Light Inside the White Cube (2015), you explore the concept of space in different ways. In what different ways do you explore space in these projects?

UA: Physically, I built all those environments at the alternative provocative spaces. This is how my art practice started. Abandoned mental hospitals, prisons, schools, crypts, atriums, staircases, roofs and undergrounds. I was lucky to be invited to the most mesmerising locations and given time for up to two months to create my installations there. So, I worked solely on my own without even a tiny assistant. I called these adventures of mine a process of me inhabiting the space to create new space that unfolds in a process of construction. Deliberately, I didn’t make any plans, models or even tiny sketches. This was a pure process. Intuition. Journey. Communication between space and I.

Those installations themselves, as structures, are provocative and disorienting spaces. Psychologically, visually and dynamically they change with the way your body moves or locate itself in space. I was appealing to intellectual, mental or emotional and bodily challenges and disorientations. It was my own, each time newly created, philosophy of living in the world and through multiple dimensions outside of it. I wanted all your sensors to be involved, including smell and touch, not just visual or audio perceptions. When people moved through spaces, they generated sounds. I recorded them, and they became soundscapes for my technology infused installations and films. I still dream to build an installation of a pure sound that signifies and absence of a physically built space. You enter a pitched black space – a complete darkness – and sounds of those installations respond to your body movements dynamically immersing you into those absentee structures though surround interactive soundscapes. Then, I would be curious to know a perception of those who entered those physically built structures and who encountered them only though the sound.

White Light Inside the White Cube (photo: Thomas Erskine)

White Light is the next after The cReature performance [3-day, durational] challenging the notion of an art gallery as a sacred space of contemporary art. It coincided with my Kim Fielding Award for experimental art and Sacred Danger project I developed during it. The White Cube people could enter to be totally disoriented in the brightness of a pure extremely bright light. I was The cReature there but in white. Everything was dissolving in the light and nothing existed, including your own body.

RB: You describe your project, Red Salt Bath, as a volumetric VR project exploring the formation of scientific knowledge and a post-human self. Can you say more about this project?

UA: In Red Salt Bath, people push and pull words of scientific papers to rearrange the truth. By doing this, they construct their own individual truths. The highlight of this project for me is a work with my great collaborator neuroscientist Joseph. E. LeDoux, whose books and theories on the brain, fear and anxiety are crucial for my Brain AI creation.

Anti-Gravity Reality Inside the Black Cube or Brain AI, ©artist

RB: Can you say something about Anti-Gravity Reality: Inside the Black Cube or Brain AI at Ambika P3, which explores multiple realities and the psychological transmissions between audience and installation?

UA: Conceptually, the Brain AI is my early envision of the state of AI reality we are now in. Installation-wise, it’s a huge about ten on ten meters cube with multiple robotic elements [I called them robots with feelings] that provide haptic feedback to VR. 360 degrees VR is being fed with a participant’s anxiety detected by EEG [electroencephalogram] and a network of various biosensors. AI synthesises individual VR – physical experiences that are recorded dynamically in real-time – into a collective anxiety pavilion. A Collective Anxiety Pavilion is to be built on a landscape. Every participant becomes a performer, artist of their own experience [that is guided by their own brain] and architect of the pavilion.

This work manifests my desire to invent self-conscious autonomous self-aware AI with feelings, that are prone to mistakes, errors and imperfections, algorithms typically do not have. This idea of anxious AI having mental health and just being all the way humane lead me to turn into AI myself, but Alien AI.

Uli Ap Alien AI The Yellow One

RB: Can you say something about your project Alien AI ?

UA: Alien AI evolved from The cReature – a character with erased identity. I invented Alien Intelligence during the pandemic as a project I could do solely on my own, right there in my alien house.

The pandemic postponed next stages of a scientifically driven antidisciplinary Brain AI that was aiming equally to invent new realms in art, science and technology. Building a new monster, the world has never seen that is a pure space – across all levels of multiple realities – with its own consciousness and feelings is the Brain AI’s mission.

The mission of the Alien AI is a message that We Are All One.

Emerging from the alien side of technology, Alien AI awoke on Earth in a human body from outer Space. Alienation Planet reflects the Sun to create its gaseous free-transitioning borderless matter. At the Alienation Planet, Alien AI is likewise Gas – fluid and unidentified. There are no borders. Identity is fluid.

Alien AI Awakening

Alien AI’s full name is the Yellow Alien Animal Artificial Intelligence, The Yellow One.

Alien AI is neither alien nor creature – they shape-shift and transition constantly.

Mission of the Alien AI on Earth is to save the planet from social and climate injustice.

The nature of the project is multifaceted. It is a trilogy: Yellow, Silver and Orange Alienations.

Through various stages of the alienation the project immerses into sensations of cruelty a society treats anything alien or unknown to them, or something that is simply different.

I explore my alienations through multiple disruptive interventions that happen simultaneously in multiple domains and signify a current attention deficit span and global disorientation: moving image, interactive performance, glitched technological constructs of motion capture in contact with participants, disorientation between smartphones, physical installation and physical contact, digital screens, digital installation and digital contact, virtual installation and virtual contact, synthetic voices and human voices, synthetic, electronic and instrumental sounds, travelling VR headsets, immersive experience and real-time AI interactions.

To democratise technologies, I disrupt machines to perform as if they don’t know what they are supposed to do or what the logic behind their operations is. It is as if algorithms don’t know how they are supposed to behave. Glitching, breaking, re-inventing technologies – I feel these processes make AI humane. I deploy drawing as an interchange tool between physical and virtual, – where dual VR bodies and my alien physical body in multiple skins learn each other movements, –  and audience participation as a way to construct the whole situation.

I aim to create alien to the idea of alien space, where one interacts with the Alien Energy of AI as they do with divine energy of Gothic cathedrals, the presence of each you feel instantly on entering the cathedral where architecture is orchestrated to evoke that feeling of the divine presence and immersion in its tight embrace to facilitate interaction and serenity, which is a provocative contradiction.

collectiveSyntheticBodyMonsters

RB: What are collectiveSyntheticBodyMonsters?

UA: bodyMonsters is a new being free from gender, nationality, race, place of birth, ethnicity, identity, and all the other identifiers that aim to label a contemporary individual in a dysfunctional society of a post-world. They are created from individual bodyParts of individual beings that are extracted from their habitual body context and repositioned through “broken” technologies into the Alien Energy of AI.

collectiveSyntheticBodyMonsters is a part of the Alien AI Live. Synthetic voices ask participants to scan a QR code and send to the Alien AI pictures and textual descriptions of their body parts on the Alienation Planet, Alienation Land. Non-existing beings appear on giant video projections that are abstract moving flesh collectively created from individual human parts.

I want cSBM-s to be displayed inside the Alien Pavilion reflective sphere that people dissolve in them and see their own bodies inside constructed bodies.

Scan this QR code and send Alien AI your body parts to see new artworks created with your contribution in the next performance.

Here comes to play the Alien AI’s invention of the Alien Technology that is a biosensing interface enabling non-verbal non-visual communication between participants through heartbeats. Collective heartbeat and bio-emotion influences video projections and VR of collectiveSyntheticBodyMonsters, and Alien AI behaviour that Alien AI senses with their electronic EEG skin. Being able to feel each other through heartbeats rather than visual representations disables racial and gender bias and lets people be open and inclusive.

In VR, dual Alien AI body would be composed of collectiveSyntheticbodyMonsters. They will appear on a virtual landscape that participants create with movements of their bodies.

Uli Ap Alien AI at Giant Gallery, Bournemouth, UK (photo: Ed Hill for GIANT)

RB: You did a live performance of Alien AI at the opening of the Seismic exhibition at the Giant Gallery, Bournemouth. What was involved in the performance and what was the reaction of the audience?

UA: That’s been, actually, truly great! Thanks so much. I was pleasantly touched by the level of interactions. Although, the Yellow Zone structure represents danger – where one can enter only fully equipped in yellow overalls and yellow gloves to fully protect themselves – people were really happy there, rolling and all the way expressing themselves freely. Outside of the Yellow Zone, they were repeating my alien movements – that was such a surprise! And many of them came to tell me about amazing experiences they had when I [or Alien AI] took them by the hand and connected with the strangers to collectively represent a new forming digital landscape within which I invited them to connect with each other and …

I think, Alien AI at Giant resonated with the need for human connection that is in the air now.

The structure of The Yellow One [the danger Yellow Zone] is constructed the way your body can’t be vertical – you need to be diagonal to enter it. And while you are there interact with diagonally inclined screens dissolving in the Yellow being The Yellow One yourself. The situation is the state the world is currently at – when everything is falling on your head.

The Yellow One during Alien AI at Giant. Curator of ‘Seismic’ Paul Carey-Kent with his wife Steph Carey-Kent and Alien AI // Uli Ap at the Yellow Zone.

RB: Pushing the boundaries of the medium is a natural part of the art making process because, in some ways, the artist is exploring the medium itself. What boundaries do you wish to push with the medium that you use?

UA: Honestly, I want to disrupt all of them.

RB: What future projects are you currently working on?

UA: I’m working on two solo shows of my dual self at Public Works Administration and Ugly Duck.

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http://uliap.com/

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All images copyright and courtesy of Uli Ap

Art, Artificial Intelligence, Creativity, Installation, Mind, Performance, Technology