American Artist’s Blue Life Seminar

In recent works you have addressed the role of technology—specifically, AI-driven predictive policing software—in perpetuating patterns of racially biased law enforcement. Users can ask your Sandy Speaks (2016) chatbot, named after Sandra Bland’s video series, a series of questions about Bland, her death, American policing, and individual rights. And your video 2015 (2019), titled after the year in which the NYPD began using predictive policing software, depicts fictionalized police dashcam footage. As in these works, it’s significant that the protagonist in Blue Life Seminar is a digital fabrication. Can you speak about the tools and the process used to create him, and to what extent he was conceived as the embodiment of technologies that reinforce the very systems of injustice he is here to dismantle?

The video 2015 was a remainder of an idea I had while working on the installation I’m Blue (If I Was █████ I Would Die), in which Blue Life Seminar was originally shown. I was doing a lot of research into police negligence—I learned this great phrase, “crisis of legitimacy,” from the author Jackie Wang, who uses it to describe the police’s feeling of ineptitude in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has condemned them as racist and ineffective. One of the arguments she makes is that the police’s adoption of algorithmic systems is a method of promoting themselves as an objective institution that relies on “police science” rather than individual bias. As anyone who’s used Google will know, the problem is that the data that informs an algorithm comes from a small number of technicians and will inherently reproduce their biases. It’s the same with policing. If all the data that a predictive policing system is informed by is racist, then the algorithm will also be racist. The way it happens might be a bit more nuanced—a bias toward a zip code rather than an individual’s facial features—but the impact is similar.

I thought a lot about the role dashcam footage has played in the last decade while I was working on Sandy Speaks. It was important for me not to reproduce the violence against Black people that is often displayed ad nauseum in the news. I understand how witnessing these acts can motivate people to action, but I’m also aware of how demoralizing it is as a Black person to witness another person being killed by police. I became interested in the dashcam footage as a technical artifact; it’s usually long, mostly uneventful, and ambivalent in what it shows. The nature of the dashcam is not one of spectacle, but the way it is presented in the media can make it seem that way. In the exhibition My Blue Window at the Queens Museum in 2019–20, where the film 2015 was first shown, viewers sat in stadium bleachers to watch fragments of simulated dashcam footage taken on a single day, but it isn’t just any footage, it involves state-of-the-art predictive policing software. The film is quite ominous and uneventful. You don’t see explicit violence, but it is implied that, off screen or in the near future, something may happen.

The Dorner/Manhattan character was created with the assistance of Tommy Martinez and Matthew Mann while I was in residence at Pioneer Works. It’s a 3D model that has been mapped onto motion data recorded from a voice actor named Christopher Grant. The script combines statements in Christopher Dorner’s manifesto alongside thoughts Dr. Manhattan has as a blue person that were written by me. It is important to distinguish this from an AI. This character isn’t learning, it’s a predetermined thing. I will say that Christopher Dorner was a very proud and loyal police officer prior to being taken off the force; in that sense, I do see him as also representing the thing he was created to critique.

In an earlier piece, A Refusal (2015–16), you replaced the images on your social media profiles with blocks of a particular shade of blue. In the body of work from 2019 of which Blue Life Seminar is a part, blue refers to a group of people who enforce state power as well as to their chosen identity. We also have lyrics from the 1998 Europop hit “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” appearing in titles of those works—and then on the simplest level, there is the association of the color blue with melancholy. Could you share more about the various implications of blue and how they come together in this video?

I’ve been using blue in my work for several years and I’ve played with its different meanings. This has been a way of reconciling how complex it is as a color. In my early work, blue represented a left-leaning political possibility. I made an argument that it is an update of the old dark blue in the American flag, a color made from indigo and harvested by enslaved people. The digital-only blue is agile and elusive, like people organizing. And it’s the color you see on a screen before an image is present, implying a potential for the representation that we ought to see. After seeing the way blue was taken up by the right, I decided to embrace the complexity of blue and investigate its multiple faces. That was around the time I learned about the Blue Lives Matter movement.

In Blue Life Seminar the melancholy isn’t imposed by me. Something that struck me about Dr. Manhattan, and why I wanted to include him, is that he’s a melancholic figure. He’s pensive and struggles with being asked to represent the United States in a military capacity. To me this didn’t align with his origins as a white physicist. I began to entertain the idea that Dr. Manhattan had been Black in his past life as a human.