Thought Experiments and Art

This quarter, American Artist is in residence at Caltech producing artistic installations that combine technology, performance, sculpture, and cultural criticism. They are also teaching the course "Seeing Systems: Critical Research as Visual Art."

Artist grew up in neighboring Altadena and studied graphic design at Cal Poly Pomona. After working as a graphic artist in Los Angeles for a couple of years, Artist relocated to New York to study fine arts at Parsons School of Design. Their engagement with the literary and actual lives of Octavia Butler, who also grew up in Altadena, has brought them to Caltech and to the archives at the The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Their most recent installation, The Monophobic Response, will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from November 1–4, 2024.

Here Artist reflects on their artistic career, what motivates their art, and their experience of Caltech.

How did you first become interested in art?

I've always been doing art. As a kid, I was really into drawing. I got some early affirmation for that and started thinking of myself as an artist and a creative person while I was still in middle school. I was also really into science and robots. At one point, I considered getting into engineering, but I didn't think it would feel creative enough in the way that interested me. On the other hand, going to art school didn't seem practical. I didn't know how I could make a living doing that, so I decided to become a graphic designer. That's what I did after college as well as during and even after graduate school. But I also began applying for artistic residencies and exhibiting work. I eventually began teaching art. Most recently, I taught at Yale in the art school, in the sculpture department.

What brought you to Caltech?

I applied to continue my work with the life and writings of Octavia Butler. Both of us grew up in Altadena, and I wanted to know more about what growing up here by the Arroyo Seco may have meant for her and whether her proximity to Caltech and JPL influenced her science fiction. I was thinking about how much she thought and wrote about space exploration, and I got curious about the overlap between what she was doing and what the rocket science industry was doing.

In one of Butler's novels, The Parable of the Sower, she writes about a ragtag group of people who convene around the religious beliefs of the main character. One of the goals of this group was to leave the planet, and so presumably, at one point, they would have done a rocket test. So, I worked with some scientists to recreate the liquid-fuel rocket engine that was developed in the 1930s by a group of rocketry enthusiasts who sometimes called themselves the Suicide Squad and whose experiments blowing things up eventually led to the creation of JPL.

We took this recreated rocket to the Mojave Desert, and we filmed performers behaving as if they were part of this religious group doing a rocket test. It was a way of merging Butler's writing with what was actually going on here in the Arroyo Seco. LACMA is exhibiting the two-channel film and displaying the rocket.

Part of why I wanted to come to Caltech was to view the Octavia Butler archives. They're housed at The Huntington. I've been looking at a lot of her documents, and I'm working on drawings that began as tracings of items in the Butler archives.

Are there any guiding themes in your artistic production?

Yes. A lot of my early work involved looking at anti-Blackness within the field of computer science. Then I got into doing work around the police and their use of surveillance technology and predictive policing, which would reproduce racial biases.

It was when I was working with themes of policing that I started thinking about speculative fiction, just along the lines of wanting to imagine another world where policing and incarceration are not such an instinctual part of how society operates. Can we imagine other possibilities? And can we visually convey some of the absurdities of the current system of policing?

What are you covering in your current class, "Seeing Systems"?

I'm trying to get the students to think about art in a more expanded way, for example, by thinking about the research artists do when they are working with themes of social injustice. If you're thinking about the visual representation of information, what can art even be? I want to get students out of the normal bounds of what we consider art.

I teach a mix of studio art and theory in this class. I'm having students make a lot of things, but there are also readings and discussion so I can introduce them to a range of contemporary artists.

I've been pleasantly surprised by the students at Caltech. They're very, very intelligent and also very creative. I think part of their creativity comes from the fact that they have less rigid ideas about what is or should be than art students typically do.