So I am showing The Thinker (after Rodin) which is a sculpture, and nine studio wall drawings. So The Thinker is a large hexagonal column and inside it has some computing equipment which is kind of doing an evolving artificial life programme which is constantly changing the way in which it calculates things. So it is literally thinking and unlike Rodin’s sculpture of this physiological, you know, representation of somebody having a think, that isn’t thinking, this is just a simple black column that has got thought inside, so the material is the kind of thought. And in AI circles the idea of “is something thinking”, we can never know, and so this idea of not knowing what the other is thinking, not knowing if we are thinking, not understanding if there is any force in the universe that might be thinking: these questions are sort of embodied in that simple column. The Thinker appears to be a minimal sculpture but in fact it’s thinking, but there is no external evidence of that. Normally when we plug a computer in we have got the VDU, the screen, the printers or other outputs allowing us to know that it’s thinking, but we never actually understand or can see the electron movements inside the microchips, or even we judge our own thinking by our behaviour: we assume someone is thinking because they are reacting. So ask questions about free will, determinism whether thought is a consequence of the things around it. The way in which it is constructed is to imply a sort of super computer or something bigger than you, but as we know computers shrink all the time and it’s just how the advent of computers have altered our way of seeing objects. Once we would see an object with a light bulb on it and we wouldn’t really know what it is but now we have this kind of ominous sense that it’s computing something which controls us in some way. If The Thinker represents a kind of internal process of thought as a sort of an energy state, then the drawings represent the residue of that state. So the drawings themselves are really what happens when somebody is in a process and they leave detritus behind, so you look at them as a journey, as a snail trail or something behind the artist travelling through time. What’s interesting is they’ve gone on over years as you see repeating themes and various interconnections between the drawings which don’t happen chronologically. There might be six month gaps between them and so when they are displayed as a whole wall, you break up that linear time, so you know, Tuesday following Monday and Wednesday following Tuesday, that doesn’t happen, it can jump backwards in time, forwards in time, and you get this kind of sense, a bit more like the brain works, of interconnection. In terms of this idea of a childhood fear, this drawing, Somewhere at the Edge of the Universe, you can see that the stars have formed the words “Turn Back Now”, and as a child in bed I used to have this kind of game I played with myself which was to try and think about the notion of infinity and I would imagine it, you know, going on and on and on and I would get to a point where my brain would kind of cut off and say “No, enough” when I would get to this “oh it never ends, it never ends”. And so, it kind of, in this drawing it’s represented as “Turn Back Now” in the stars and it’s not really about space, it’s about the human mind and its limitations and the way in which it protects itself from those things that it can’t understand. My art career was extremely different after the Turner Prize. I mean, because the demand to see and own my work, I would say, doubled overnight. Even though it’s only a kind of superficial thing, I have never seen my name in print without the words Turner Prize winner after and it’s a really strange thing and you can’t rub it out, you can’t go back and rub it out. But I have never seen it, even on articles that are written about something completely different to art, it’s still written, and so it’s a kind of cattle brand for life I think. And that’s testament to its success really, because people don’t do that unless it’s a culturally understood title.
