Recursions

“Recursion” refers to an object’s ability to create an instance of or reveal itself through pattern. Working with photography, video, and text, Tressa Pack explores the technological ramifications of this phenomenon in Recursions, on view at Incline Gallery through September 20. In particular, Pack looks to experiments conducted at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab that aim to demonstrate that robots can exhibit abilities similar to our own. Pack pays as much attention to the code that the robots generate as they “think” about performing simple tasks as to the salvaged circuit boards they’re built from.

Guest curator Suzanne L’Heureux has created a contemplative atmosphere in which to experience Pack’s work, siting one or two pieces on each landing of Incline’s repurposed space. Indeed, the ramps of the former mortuary offer the perfect environment in which to consider Pack’s meditations on sentience and transience. Photographs of machines, printed large and installed at the viewer’s eye level, present objects with attachments or “limbs” that appear recognizable, mirroring our own corporeality. At each “station” along the gallery’s upward slope, we are confronted with objects for which action or inaction, life or death, may be determined by human whim.

Tressa Pack. Diptych 3, 2015; mounted archival inkjet print; 28 x 44 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Incline Gallery, San Francisco.

The video Seen/Foreseen (2015), encountered at the top of the foremost ramp, combines footage of an unpopulated forest footpath with that of a robot programmed to pick up a Campbell’s soup can. The video’s perspective seems to extend the gallery space into the peaceful arboreal setting depicted. This false sense of a possible forward trajectory contrasts with the notable difficulty the robot has in realizing the simple task for which it was built. The juxtaposition reaches beyond the obvious binary of the natural and the mechanical to offer a complex consideration of sensate experience.

Further along, the photographs comprising Recursions: Diptych 3 (2015) reveal the opened and closed central cavity of a robot, its internal bundle of cables evocative of the miles of blood vessels that make human life possible. Without an electronic source feeding them, the dormant conduits give the robot a mournful pall.

Like the rest of the works in the exhibition, Recursions: Diptych 3 balances a near-clinical examination of machines as laboriously programmed tools that may someday reach sentience against deep-seated romantic notions of creation and mortality. That uneasy equilibrium, bolstered by the variety of media Pack employs, makes her meditations on what we create in our own fraught image more substantive than the critiques of hubris-driven consumerism that they also contain.

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Recursions is on view at Incline Gallery, in

San Francisco