Brandon Cronenberg’s debut feature film from 2012, Antiviral, depicts a world in which ordinary people pay through the nose to be infected with viruses and other illnesses that have been harvested from the bodies of celebrities. Many can’t actually afford this, leading to the creation of an extensive black market, which also offers more exotic procedures, such as getting cloned celebrity skin grafted onto (or into) oneself. After a long series of misadventures, including a failed attempt at bypassing a genetic copy-protect, and a string of increasingly high-stakes black market dealings, the protagonist eventually finds themselves locked in a room, dying of a disease harvested from a now-dead celebrity, where their own deterioration and death will be broadcast live for the dead star’s obsessive fans.
In the end (spoilers) they manage to wheel and deal their way out of this ill-fated end, and begin working for the company ultimately behind the whole scheme. Combining a number of technologies seen throughout the film, they create a ‘Cell Garden’ from the dead celebrity’s DNA, and repeatedly infect it with various diseases which can then be sold at a premium to an eager public.
While very much a first film, and far from perfect, Antiviral is a strong first showing from Cronenberg, (who of course had a considerable head start, due to his more famous father) which proved to be prescient in a number of ways. While the germ of what would become contemporary celebrity culture definitely existed in 2012, it had not yet reached maturity, and more than a few of Cronenberg’s contemporaries failed to predict where things were headed. For our purposes here however, I’m less concerned with celebrity in particular, and more interested in the increasingly efficient pipeline that exists between consumption, emulation, and generation.
While not entirely in line with their own words about their work, this core idea, and the cultural shift which it represents, is ultimately what stood out to me when viewing Ian Haig’s digital image series Pox Party. The series, which utilizes generative AI, depicts a crowded club scene (just as likely punk as jungle trance) filled with bizarre, fleshy figures, whose bodies appear to have been simultaneously torn open and folded into themselves, their faces pained but undeterred.
The artist’s own intentions with the piece are to explore the contradictions which exist between the current trend of Silicon Valley inspired post or transhumanism, and the fundamental inability of the technologies which that movement has pinned its hopes on to understand even the most basic elements of the human form. Belief in the singularity, or other forms of digital immortality, are dependent upon fostering the belief that the digital lacks the ‘undesirable’ (in most cases meaning inefficient to the performance of labour for profit) human limitations that we mere mortals have been cursed with. The reality of course is that generative AI and its related technologies have yet to learn how to convincingly render anatomically correct 2D images of hands, let alone surpass the core essence of humanity.
No, in actuality, digital technologies, in their current state, possess precisely the same limits that humans do, (as well as many that we don’t) and are simply able to hit those limits with much greater efficiency. It isn’t surprising therefore that tech bros, and the institutions which exist to fill their bank accounts, have latched onto this idea of digital transcendence. They are, after all, obsessed with efficiency, as well as wholly unable to perceive the value of anything which isn’t directly amenable to capital and its goals; with anything that stands in the way of those goals (such as the need for creative labour based on actual talent or insight) seen as a bug to be coded out.
This has, regrettably, led to the current state of generative AI and other large-language models like ChatGPT. While such technologies, outside of the malformed and profit-driven goals of Capitalism, could have legitimate uses, or even radical potentials, as they exist now they’re merely a gormless attempt at accessing the benefits of creativity, experience and talent without actually possessing any. Just as the fetishistic collection and marketization of diseases within Antiviral is an attempt to access the physical reality of celebrity without having to attain it.
Within the film, the market for celebrity illnesses goes from one utterly dependent on those celebrities, and their continued cultural standing, to one that has technologically eliminated them from the process; instead using vat-grown gardens of their flesh (ideally after their death, and therefore ability to claim legal ownership over their own bodies) to mass-generate valuable commodities on demand.
The market cultivated a consumer desire, (both accelerated and intensified by the soul-crushing nature of the very system which allows for that market to exist in the first place) and then co-opted various technologies to supply evermore novel ways to fulfill it, before ultimately eliminating its original (human) source in favour of infinitely reproducible and (literally) soulless machine-generated versions. Consumption leads to emulation, and emulation leads to generation. The human to anti-human pipeline at work.
The same pipeline which shifts the essential resources for life from the many who need them to the few who simply hoard them, has evolved over the brief history of Neoliberalism to transport our agency, desire, and ultimately the very need for our existence at all, right along with all that wealth. The digital as it exists is not, by any measure or definition, the path to human transcendence. It’s the universal medium by which more and more of ourselves is pumped through the sewers of Capitalism into the gaping mouths of corporations. And we’re paying for the fucking privilege.
So if at all possible, avoid the Pox Party Or at least do your best to skip the cover. Otherwise, we’ll all end up like the tortured and ever-dancing figures of Haig’s work; equal parts spilled open and folded up in ourselves, while the AI DJ plays another beat.