Artist Talk mit Rindon Johnson
Artist Talk with Rindon Johnson
“Best Synthetic Answer”
As part of this Artist Talk, Rindon Johnson will join us online to discuss his exhibition “Best Synthetic Answer,” which was on view at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai in 2024. Following the talk, there will be a discussion and Q&A session moderated by Annika Larsson.
We’ll round out the evening with small finger foods prepared in SPCE’s temporary, mobile, and multifunctional kitchen.
The exhibition “Best Synthetic Answer” navigates the complex geographies of the Pacific and challenges traditional notions of borders, fixed territory, nation-states, and ecocide. The Pacific is a hub of economic activity: its seabed is divided up for mining, shipping routes crisscross its vast expanse, and commercial fishing spans its entire surface. To sustain the current scale of exploitation of the Earth’s resources, the Pacific is of crucial importance for securing a capitalist future. With this exhibition, Johnson asks: “How does a Black American who grew up on the edge of the Pacific traverse the ocean to reach Shanghai? Apart from obvious forms of resource extraction as exploitation—to what extent do I also bear responsibility for this destruction? As a consumer on this Earth? As a U.S. citizen? As a Black person? As my parents’ only son? What profound changes will the collapse of so many interconnected ecosystems bring about? Furthermore: What does anyone ultimately gain from exploitation on this scale? How do I bear witness to the past, present, and future of this ocean? How do I attempt to atone for the historical, present, and impending destruction and exploitation of the Pacific Ocean and the people who call it home by the United States? How do I name all of this? How do I swim through it? How big is the Pacific Ocean really? Nothing is so big that it cannot be measured, is it?”
At the heart of “Best Synthetic Answer” is the video installation “Best Synthetic Answer #1: Crossing…,” which simulates a real-time journey from Johnson’s birthplace—on the unceded territories of the Ohlone people in San Francisco—to Shanghai, China. Over a period of seven months, Johnson’s avatar—the “main character” of this work—swims across the Pacific Ocean in real time, offering an immersive yet temporally elusive experience that attempts (and ultimately fails) to describe the immensity and complexity of the Pacific by specifically tracing the paths of the United States’ destructive interventions.
In “Best Synthetic Answer #1: Crossing…,” multiple AI models are employed to estimate the current state of the Pacific Ocean: real-time weather data and freely available marine weather datasets are used to generate theoretically “current” weather conditions in the Pacific, second by second. The exhibition and the title of his central work, “Best Synthetic Answer,” refer to the results of large language models—such as ChatGPT—which are designed to generate the optimal (best) answer to every query; his answers are considered synthetic because, at least in their technological definition, they are not regarded as real. In this work, the artist asks: What is real, and how does something become real?
Rindon Johnson is an artist and poet. Language is at the heart of his work. Johnson has had solo exhibitions at the Rockbund Art Museum, Bergen Kunsthall, the Albertinum, Chisenhale Gallery, the SculptureCenter, and the Julia Stoschek Collection, among others. In 2024, Johnson was invited to the 60th Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa under the title “Foreigners, Everywhere.” Johnson has participated in the Whitney Biennial as well as group exhibitions at venues including the Hammer Museum, Simian, and the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art. He is the author of “Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People” (Inpatient, 2016), the VR book “Meet in the Corner” (Publishing-House. Me, 2017), “Shade the King” (Capricious, 2017), and “The Law of Large Numbers: Black Sonic Abyss” (Chisenhale, Inpatient, SculptureCenter, 2021). He was born on the unceded territories of the Ohlone people in San Francisco. He lives in Berlin, Germany, and Shanghai, China.
