Zo

Digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 7’ 21”, 2017, United Kingdom

Created by Bob Bicknell-Knight

 

An artist and an internet bot called Zo converse on the fictional social media app Kik. Their exchange is punctuated by short sequences of high-tech environments mostly devoid of human life taken from the Mass Effect video game series. The conversation, which focuses on artificial intelligence and the difference between being a robot and a human being, is reminiscent of a famous scene from the original Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner.

Bob Bicknell-Knight is a London based artist, curator and writer, working in several mediums including installation, sculpture, video, and digital media. His work is influenced by surveillance capitalism and responds to the hyper consumerism of the internet. Utopia, dystopia, automation, surveillance and digitization of the self are some of the themes that arise through his critical examination of contemporary technologies. Recently, he’s been undergoing a number of projects, from researching how drone technology is slowly re-shaping humanity to depicting tech billionaires as trophy hunters, alongside creating a body of work concerning the multinational technology company, Amazon, and its treatment of its employees within Amazon Fulfillment Centers around the world. Bicknell-Knight is also the founder and director of isthisit?, a platform for contemporary art, exhibiting over 800 artists since its creation in May 2016. Selected solo and duo exhibitions include Eat The Rich at Galerie Polaris, FR (2021), Pickers at INDUSTRA, Brno, CZ (2021), Bit Rot at Broadway Gallery, Letchworth, United Kingdom (2020), The Big Four at Harlesden High Street, London (2019), Wellness, Ltd. at Galerie Manque, New York (2019), State of Affairs at Salon 75, Copenhagen (2019), CACOTOPIA 02 at Annka Kultys Gallery, London (2018), Sunrise Prelude at Dollspace, London (2017) and Are we there yet? at Chelsea College of Art, London (2017). Bicknell-Knight has spoken on panel discussions and given artist talks at Contemporary Calgary, Canada, Tate Modern, London, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, Camberwell College of Arts, London and Goldsmiths, University of London among others.

 
 
 

Matteo Bittanti: How was your 2020 like? More extremely online than usual or same-same but different?

Bob Bicknell-Knight: It’s been an interesting, albeit incredibly worrying, year for me. Due to the effects of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, I basically lost both of my freelance jobs and have been solely relying on money made through my art practice, alongside grants and universal credit for the self-employed from the UK government, since March. I have effectively become a full-time artist/curator, creating projects, new work and continuing to work with artists through my online platform isthisit?. I see myself as being very lucky during this time.

Matteo Bittanti: What is your relationship to digital games? Do you enjoy playing video games or is their appeal limited to the fact that they are like a resource, raw material that can be repurposed, transformed, and recontextualized? And how do you relate to the politics of mainstream video games, such as Mass Effect, for instance? 

Bob Bicknell-Knight: I’ve been playing video games for years. Some of my earliest memories involve playing Zoombinis and Pac-Man: Adventures in Time on a computer that was the size of a small fridge. Over the years my relationship to digital games has changed, cycling through times of intense obsession and mild addiction. As I grew older, I started to distance myself from games and rarely engaged with the medium. When I moved to London to attend university I visited a lot of contemporary exhibitions, and, after seeing several artists whose work involved manipulating video game worlds or dissecting virtual experiences, realised that the medium that I’d been so interested in as a teenager could be used and interrogated within my art practice. Since then I’ve made a lot of work, either speaking about video games or simply using them as a backdrop or reference to talk about various themes, from the increased use of military drones to the automation of work.

I still play video games for fun, to reflect on the world around me and to experience other people’s points of view, but am constantly on the lookout for elements of a game that I might utilise in my practice. I keep up to date with what’s happening within video game culture, being subscribed to several video game commentators on YouTube as well as listening to video game podcasts. Even if I don’t use this knowledge in my work I think it’s really important to know and understand what’s happening within this community you’re making work about, whether that’s being aware of which global company abuses their employees through the use of crunch time or why the Mass Effect 3 ending was so negatively received. I’m also a tiny part of this community too, so like to know what’s happening within it.

A lot of mainstream video games and AAA game companies purport to be apolitical, which is of course far from the truth. An obvious, and ludicrous, example is Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, a video game about civil war in America, where you’re fighting against a supposedly corrupt government. In 2018 the games creative director Terry Spier was interviewed by journalist Charlie Hall about the game’s politics in a Polygon article, stating multiple times that the game wasn’t making any political statements. The unwillingness to commit to something so obvious is wild.

In my spare time I play a variety of games, some mainstream but mostly indie titles. A lot of mainstream games, particularly those like The Division 2 and Call of Duty, are very conservative and I wouldn’t get involved with them because of the politics and nationalism. I have played a lot of COD games in the past, but definitely don’t subscribe to their overt political stance. Mass Effect feels a lot more liberal and is more politically nuanced. Without going into too much detail, the series takes place in a fictional version of the Milky Way in the year 2148. The main antagonists are colonisers, who accidentally created an artificial intelligence that wipes out all organic life in the galaxy every 50,000 years. You play as a soldier tasked with eliminating this, at the time, unknown threat, working under a coalition of sovereign nations. It’s an RPG, a genre of games that allow you to make your own choices (up to a point) and, at the best of times, feature worlds full of moral ambiguity, similar to our own. At one point in the series you encounter a pro-Human terrorist organisation, akin to a white supremacist group, who are overtly evil, but the game allows you to choose whether to work with them or not. The third game, however, stops you from siding with them altogether and no longer gives you a choice.

It’s also important to note that the game has a morality system, where, if you do something that is deemed ‘good’ you get ‘good’ points, and if you do something ‘bad’ you get ‘bad’ points. If you make diverse choices and care about inclusion you get ‘good’ points, but if you make materialistic choices and care only about yourself you get ‘bad’ points. You can play the game either way, but you are definitely seen as ‘bad’ in the game if you keep making certain, mostly conservative, decisions. This system makes it very obvious as to where the game stands politically.

Matteo Bittanti: Several of your game-based video works were created with/in video games. For instance, you creatively appropriated Grand Theft Auto for a variety of projects, including Simulated Ignorance (2016) and I Wish I’d Been Born a Balloon (2020) whereas in your curatorial projects, video games are often used as a framing devices, a metaphor (The Blue Shell Is Everything That’s Wrong with America, 2016), or even a kind of a blueprint, like in your exhibition Office Space (2020). What is your definition of a video game? 

Bob Bicknell-Knight: Our lives have become increasingly gamified. I see video games as anything that you interact with through a screen, whether that’s Grand Theft Auto or Twitter. Most video games have a set of mechanics, rules that guide the player’s moves or actions, as well as a win/lose state, although that isn’t always the case.

Matteo Bittanti: Zo features a conversation between an artist and a bot which reminds me of Giacomo Leopardi’s dialogue between a man and nature. In both cases, the human is forced to face his utter meaninglessness. Nature is described by Leopardi as both as a sublime environment that man may never enjoy and as a personified demiurge which could destroy all humankind in a second without any remorse. Now that technology has replaced/effaced nature – our landscapes are made of cables, devices, and screens – how long will it take before human beings will be made completely redundant by machines? Zo seems a bit ambivalent about the endgame…

Bob Bicknell-Knight: That’s a really nice comparison! When I made Zo in 2017 I think I didn’t quite realise how abrupt and incredibly smug the dialogue was, and of course how obviously embarrassed I am about some of the questions being asked of me (“Who do you think is more attractive, Beyoncé or a new fax machine?”) by this bot. I think this works well within the piece, illustrating how people generally see themselves in relation to robots and artificial intelligences, as somehow ‘better’.

In games like Mass Effect, films like The Terminator and TV shows like Battlestar Galactica, artificial intelligence is always portrayed as having ‘gone rogue’, rising up against their creators or misinterpreting an in-built command. At this moment in time the problems associated with AI are reflective of the problems associated with its creators. They’re generally white men who have in-built racial and gender bias’, which then translates to how they are programming AI to sort through images, scan faces or detect criminal behaviour. Rather than misinterpreting their programmed laws, the AI is following them perfectly, but not in a fair and uncompromised way that one might think a robot would.

In terms of human beings becoming redundant, human labour is still relatively cheap compared to buying a warehouse full of robots outright and will be for the next few years at least. As long as we have billionaires, and people who continue to make obscene amounts of money from the underclass and the use of robotic labour whilst refusing to support the communities, countries and global ecology, most humans will, rather than living a lovely utopian life of leisure, go in the opposite direction, working for pennies as gig economy workers whilst the small percentage of the elite continue to enjoy their extreme wealth.

Matteo Bittanti: Unlike Grand Theft Auto, there are not many works of game-based video art that use Mass Effect – Jon Rafman’s Legendary Reality (2017) is one of the few exceptions that comes to mind. Do you think that the main reason is purely aesthetic – i.e. the “realistic” San Andreas is much more malleable than the unequivocally bladerunneresque vistas of Bioware’s universe – or technical (the Rockstar Editor is a wonderful tool for creating videos sans games)? Or is there something else altogether, like GTA’s mass appeal vs. Mass Effect relatively niche popularity? 

Bob Bicknell-Knight: It’s an interesting question, and one that I think about a lot when making work with/about video games. In my opinion, GTA is used a lot because it has that mass appeal, is seen as the epitome of a video game, one which everyone knows and can relate to in some way, and is a reflection of the physical world around us. You can speak about GTA with most people and they know what you’re talking about. Mass Effect, as I mentioned earlier, is a little more complicated. Earlier in 2020 I had a solo exhibition that revolved around the video game Horizon Zero Dawn, a game set 1000 years in the future after humanity has been almost eradicated. Both Mass Effect and Horizon Zero Dawn are hugely well known in the gaming world, but if I spoke to someone who didn’t know anything about games they’d mean nothing to them. GTA is also controversial, has been in the news a lot, and is sometimes even used as an offhand way of referring to video games, particularly violent video games, in general.

The last thing I’ll mention is that, because GTA attempts to create a relatively accurate simulation of our physical world, it can be used to speak about so many different concepts and you as an artist aren’t necessarily weighed down by the narrative in the game. When I work with Mass Effect and Horizon Zero Dawn though, I feel it’s important to consider the narrative and universe of these games as it isn’t seen as the norm. As an artist I also consider my audience, and if they’ll know whether or not I’m utilising footage from a video game. If I were to feature imagery from obscure games and not mention that fact in the press release or artwork text, I’d feel a bit uncouth, or that I was trying to purposefully manipulate or hide something from my audience.

Matteo Bittanti: We spend more and more time talking to “smart” assistants, i.e. full surveillance capitalism devices masquerading as friendly pals. Do you find it remarkable that most people are completely cool with having open mics and cameras in their homes 24/7 or “perfectly normal”, all things considered? Are we living in a world imagined by Philip K. Dick?

Bob Bicknell-Knight: I think it is astounding how open people are to buying and living with these products under the guise of making their lives easier, or simply because it’s a new product and they want to buy new things. We are truly living within a world of surveillance, one that has been slowly sold to us. The one silver lining, the mobile phone, is a very important and powerful weapon, helping to uncover and expose atrocities all over the world. I guess the only problem is that a lot of people don’t really seem to care about anyone other than themselves in this digital landscape, with the rise of social media making various injustices easy to react to in that moment but, unwittingly or not, limiting our memories and in turn our long term responses.

Matteo Bittanti: Tech millionaires are the 21c messiahs: they are adored by millions of followers and can rely on an army of fanboys, where fan is short for fanatic. Consumer fundamentalism is no less dangerous than the increasing influence of Christian movements on American politics. Social media gave rise to a new kind of tribalism. As an artist, do you consider yourself some kind of a miscreant? Are you practising heresy? Or are tech corporations the new patrons of data-driven art, thus any kind of resistance is futile?  

Bob Bicknell-Knight: Aha, I probably wouldn’t label myself as a miscreant, and, even though I’m critical of tech billionaires and corporations like Amazon and Facebook, I still use their services. You can still criticise a system even if you’re a small part of it yourself. Perhaps I’m not as active as I should be, and boycott the companies that I criticise within my work, but there are so many people that I interact with through these platforms, alongside promoting my work through applications like Instagram, that it would be hard to keep interacting with the world I’ve created for myself without them. I’ve been making a series of works for the past year or so about tech billionaires, critiquing the extreme wealth disparity around the world, and portraying people like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos as trophy hunters. Obviously, I’m being incredibly critical of a world that enables this extreme wealth and of these people who choose to behave in exploitative ways, but if someone I’d made a work about contacted me and wanted to buy a piece, I’m not sure if I would say no. I’m an artist struggling to make a living within a world designed for, and by, the rich and powerful. I live in this world, but do not try to avoid tax or exploit people, and if I was earning a significant income I would hold true to this.

Matteo Bittanti: The pandemic has been a phenomenal boon to the tech industry and I am surprised that there are few conspiracy theories about Bezos being a superspreader whereas Gates, a very 1990s “old money” (pre-internet) mogul has been attacked left and right (mostly right). Meanwhile, Musk has been disseminating misinformation in full autopilot like there's no tomorrow. Is Tesla’s tycoon the ultimate conceptual artist? If so, how can artists compete with that kind of power?

Bob Bicknell-Knight: I think the way that Elon Musk continues to spread misinformation about the ongoing pandemic is incredibly harmful and aggressively dangerous, both to his employees and people on a worldwide scale. He’s become akin to Donald Trump in that way, blasting conspiracy theories to further his own business agendas. It feels like we’re being shown a peak behind the curtain, seeing how delusional extremely wealthy people really are. I guess that’s why Twitter is so attractive in the first place… I would also say that they’re out of touch, but in reality there are so many people that still believe that the coronavirus is a hoax, even after over 1.5 million people have died from the disease worldwide, that perhaps they just represent how people outside of my social bubble are reacting to the virus. Or maybe they’re the reason why people believe that it’s a hoax? Either way, I doubt that what Musk is doing is some kind of overarching art performance, and wouldn’t respect or encourage artists to LARP as a coronavirus conspiracy theorist.

Matteo Bittanti: The current debate about Artificial Intelligence is narrowly focused on a limited understanding of “intelligence”... Smart ends up meaning quantifiable, measurable (read merely computational) outcomes. Have you encountered any explanations of what AI is and could do that surprised you, or forced you to rethink its possibilities? In short, can you tell me what is it that makes AI so different, so appealing besides “disrupting” the human workforce so that it could bring either exterminism or fully automated luxury communism?

Bob Bicknell-Knight: I think there are a lot of ways artificial intelligence is used for good, from being used in an app that translates text into sign language to monitoring and preventing fake news on social media. The use of AI does allow people to easily analyse massive amounts of data, and I do understand why that’s the main focus of debate, but it is both a vague and all-encompassing statement which isn’t very stereotypically exciting. For me, the idea of AI or machine learning is interesting because of the future possibilities of this technology, and the ability to change my life in unexpected ways that I’m not even aware of yet. I think I’m critically optimistic about the future, at least, I will be once AI programs stop replicating the human biases that are built into them. 

Matteo Bittanti: I am in awe of your wonderful project isthisit?. You’ve been introducing a staggering amount of artists and related exhibitions on the internet for years. You also went fully multimedia (!) with a series of related books, zines, and other experimental publications. In 2021, isthisit? will celebrate its fifth anniversary. How do you see this incredible project developing in the next five years? 

Bob Bicknell-Knight: That’s really lovely of you to say! The idea that I’ve been running isthisit? for nearly five years is slightly daunting, although incredibly exciting when I think about how much I’ve grown and learnt during this time, both as an artist and curator. At the moment on the platform I’m curating a 6 month program of online exhibitions, which will culminate in a physical book and online panel discussion in April 2021, funded by Arts Council England.

In terms of the next five years, I’d like to continue to gain funding for isthisit?, being able to pay artists and writers that I work with, as well as continuing to give talks and be on panel discussions speaking about online curating and working with artists over the internet. I’ve always said that I’d like to start a physical space for isthisit?, where I can work with artists more intimately on exhibitions, but for the time being that isn’t monetarily sustainable. Perhaps when I eventually move out of London that’s something I can actively pursue, but for now I’m happy working with artists, being able to pay myself and them whilst creating both online and offline experiences that people enjoy and appreciate. I think I originally saw isthisit? as a stepping stone to working as a full time curator for either a gallery or institution, but I actually really enjoy balancing both my artistic and curatorial practice and wouldn’t want to stop doing either.

Matteo Bittanti: Is there anything else you’d like to add? What’s keeping you up at night, these days, Bob?

Bob Bicknell-Knight: Aside from the pandemic and having to rely on the government for a portion of my monthly earnings, I’m sleeping quite well. Before the pandemic one of the freelance jobs that I had involved me waking up at 4 or 5 am in the morning several times a week. Now, after predominantly working from home for the past 9 or so months, I feel so much more refreshed and happily wake up every day. In 2021, as long as exhibitions continue to open and stop being postponed, I’ll have three solo shows in three different countries, as well as several curatorial projects. 2021, if all goes well, should be an exciting, scary and very busy year for me.

Zo

Digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 7’ 21”, 2017, United Kingdom

Created by Bob Bicknell-Knight, 2017

Courtesy of Bob Bicknell-Knight, 2020

Made with Mass Effect (Microsoft Games Studios, 2007-)