A Robot Won't Stop Giving Speeches Inside Shanghai's Rong Zhai. It's an Exhibition

A century-old mansion, a robot, groundbreaking artworks from decades ago…

"We should be afraid of ourselves, because 'the unfortunate truth is that most evil is committed by people who never decided to be good or evil.'"

"Technology exists in our nature. We use tools to picture our dreams and to make them real. Technology does not make us 'posthuman' or 'transhuman,' the way writers and scholars describe it. Technology makes us human."

"Reflecting on all these ideas, all this knowledge, all these propositions about the future of history; though I have never lived through them, I know these are the moments when collapse can come. Speech after speech ends in illegitimate motives meant to push humanity to change how it thinks. Speech after speech prophesies the end, warning that one day humanity will no longer be able to see the stars."

"The earth, like all mothers, will one day say goodbye to her children."

All of this comes out of the mouth of a robot that is almost indistinguishable from a living person. It has been installed in a century-old mansion in Shanghai, holding forth in front of a wall in one of the rooms. It recites a monologue assembled from excerpts of many important speeches, and claims to be a repository of human oratory.

This is one of the works in Who Was I?, the exhibition now on view at Prada Rong Zhai in Shanghai — a piece called To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll. The "Son of Man" robot speaks in front of visitors without pause. As it talks, its gaze shifts, its eyes roll, and it blinks. It commands the rhythm of its delivery well, its hand gestures changing to match, and every so often it may even meet your eyes.

If it weren't for the box and the wires at its base, you might not realize it is a robot at all. The last line of its seven-page speech is also the theme of the exhibition: "I had never yet seen a being resembling me… What was I?" The line comes from the monologue of the creature in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein.

Rong Zhai is a garden villa in Shanghai, bought a hundred years ago by the "Flour King," Rong Zongjing. In 2011 Prada leased the old house and renovated it on a "restore it as it was" principle, for use as an exhibition space. Who Was I? continues the particular pairing of this mansion with the art inside it — a combination that sometimes lets an oil painting become part of the architecture, and sometimes produces friction, as it does this time.

But this is not a robot show. The curator, Goshka Macuga, is also one of the exhibiting artists. Turning other people's works into her own narrative is a mode of expression she uses often.

In 1999, when Macuga was still a young artist, she made an exhibition work called Cave, using the works of more than 30 peers to build a prehistoric cave out of crumpled brown paper in a basement-like setting. She has said: "I provided a coherent, unified environment for other people's work; their work became mine, and mine became theirs."

The robot is her work too, designed by Macuga and built in Japan by the company A Lab.

Take the robot away and this could be an abstract art show in an old villa. The other 30 works on display come from the Fondazione Prada collection — Italian sculptures, paintings, and installations made between 1958 and 1993 — along with three recent collages from Macuga's "Discrete Models" series.

Most of these works date from the 1950s to the 1970s, and none of them is easy to grasp at a glance. Visitors entering Rong Zhai are handed a 67-page guidebook that introduces each work, its maker, and what made it a breakthrough in the society of its time.

The show includes, for instance, three works by Lucio Fontana, founder of the Spatialism movement, placed in three separate rooms. Fontana published the White Manifesto in 1946, declaring: "Matter, color, and sound in motion are the phenomena whose simultaneous development makes up the new art." In the manifesto he defined "Spatialism" in detail and set out to push a new form of artistic expression.

His best-known contribution to art is a series of "slashed" canvases. Between 1949 and 1950, Fontana began piercing his canvases. "Making a hole," he said, "broke the space of the canvas, as if to say: from now on we are free to do what we like." He saw his idea of space as a utopian form, roaming beyond the material limits of painting or sculpture.

The exhibition shows Fontana's cuts made on canvas, on blocks of terracotta, and in bronze — "Waiting" and "Nature," from his Spatial Concept series.

In a third-floor room an umbrella stands open on the wooden floor, a lit neon tube running through it. The installation is called Umbrella, by Mario Merz, one of the leading figures of Arte Povera.

The Arte Povera movement ran from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, across Italy's major cities. In the turbulent Italy of the late 1960s, artists took a radical stance and began attacking the settled values of government, industry, and cultural institutions. In fact, the movement was not really claiming "poverty" for itself; it used salvaged junk and everyday materials as its medium, in order to break out of the constraints of traditional "high" art and redefine the language and ideas of art.

Works like these are spread through many rooms of Rong Zhai. Seeing the show is something like a treasure hunt: you walk into a room, notice an object, look at the number beside it, and only then can you turn to the matching page in the guidebook. Even the central piece, To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll, sits at the far end of a room that is not easy to find.

Macuga, curator and artist, told QDaily: "I didn't want to put the robot somewhere obvious, so that you see it right away. So you walk around the house, and at some point you find it, rather than seeing it the moment you walk in. I wanted seeing the show to be like a journey, where you explore for yourself, from one room to the next." The robot, she added, is not the most important work in the show — only one of them.

A century-old mansion, a robot, groundbreaking works from decades ago: Macuga has put these conflicting yet connected pieces side by side. "Through these works, I could extend into the visual information of the robot's speech."

And visitors who ignore the booklet are free to build their own imagination and understanding. "This approach lets people project their own meaning onto it, even without an explanation, or without needing to read [the guidebook]. The visual information, where the work sits in the house, how you project these narratives through your own perspective — when all of that comes together, I think it's a more interesting experience," Macuga told QDaily.

Another way to read it: in a scene from the future, the robot becomes the only resident of Rong Zhai, and an independent presence within the house. At the same time, these works shape a domestic setting, a private home, in which the robot can create its own future "existence."

What Macuga wants to say here can perhaps be read, in part, out of the robot's English speech. Its content came from three months of research by Macuga, drawing on the words of Gorbachev, Martin Luther King Jr., Einstein, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Nietzsche, Hamlet, Churchill, Plato, and others. "All these fragments became the robot's entire monologue."

Macuga said: "But I think what I want to do is try to deal with these questions related to civilization. We're all struggling with an idea — that perhaps in the near future, we will no longer be able to survive in a simple way." That is exactly the note struck by the neon work Who Was I? at the exhibition's exit, and by the question of existence Frankenstein set out to explore.

We also talked with Goshka Macuga about the following, which may help in understanding the exhibition and her thinking.

Q: QDaily

M: Goshka Macuga, born in Warsaw, Poland in 1967, now based in London. Her work spans sculpture, installation, photography, architecture, and design. In her practice she often takes on the roles of artist, curator, collector, researcher, and exhibition designer.

Q: Why didn't you put clothes on the robot? Apart from the box and the wires on the floor giving it away, it could almost pass for a real person.

M: This is the result of high technology, and of a collaboration with the Japanese company A Lab and its scientists. This robot looks human, but the one we are presenting here is an extension of that collaborative product, or you could say a copy of it. So I didn't want to alter it or build something on top of it; I have great respect for A Lab's work with us.

At the same time I wanted to convey a very honest idea — that it is, in fact, not human. I wanted to make a sincere presentation: it is a machine. But when you look into this machine's eyes, it is in fact emotional. Even so, we have to make it clear that it's a machine. In an earlier exhibition I put transparent clothing on the robot. Not this time. I wanted to bring out the ambiguity of its identity instead.

Q: On what basis did you choose the current text of the robot's speech?

M: To choose what the robot says, I did about three months of research. Speeches, diaries, books — whatever the form, these were all things I knew well and loved. I loved the meaning these texts carry.

The process amounted to re-editing the material into an entirely new work. I put these things together. By putting all these different things into one new text, it was a bit like re-editing a narrative. I read a great deal, picked out certain pieces of information, treated that information as a kind of vocabulary, and reassembled it into what I needed.

The text I used this time is connected to what I used in my 2016 Milan exhibition. It's the same research, expressed in a different form. [In the Milan show] one part was a robot; another was scrolls, paintings, and objects on a table. Another part was about sculpture — I might put different "hats" on different thinkers and different people, and they would all go into that group of sculptures together.

The impulse to gather these texts also came from an organization founded after the Second World War, whose members included Einstein and Freud, among others. Different thinkers and scientists formed it to offer advice. Einstein's proposal was to talk with different people, to try to find a way to stop war, and to do it in a way that stirred intellectuals, rather than following the political agendas politicians set. So it was like an alternative to the political system — that was the organization's vision.

For me, these people's ideas were a great source of inspiration. That is also why I gathered their thinking together: I wanted to create something like an imagined community.

Basically, the figures and the quotations [in the speech] all relate to these individuals, whether they are philosophers, politicians, or artists. What connects them to the robot is my research into rhetoric, artificial intelligence, artificial memory, and so on. That is why I wanted these figures to give a speech. All these fragments became the robot's entire monologue. So it is a fairly complex process — but the process doesn't only let me finish the work, it also lets me gather information, learn things, explore things. You know, this is the way I like to work.

Q: Many of the works in the show were highly challenging pieces in their own time. Add this robot and this century-old building — how would you describe everything inside this space?

M: It's a long story, because I want to talk to you about all the individual artworks and how they appear in the robot's narrative.

If we go through the robot and every work in the exhibition, behind each piece stands a very important art movement of the 20th century. And these movements were mostly trying, in one way or another, to go beyond some kind of boundary — the Zero movement, for example, along with works that respond to human life, and works that respond to elements of technology. Through these works, I could extend into the visual information of the robot's speech. These works carry, in a way, more meaning or intent, attached to the artist and to the historical moment when the artist made them.

But in a way this approach lets people project their own meaning onto it, even without an explanation, or without needing to read [the guidebook]. When the visual information, where the works sit within the house, and how you project these narratives through your own perspective all come together, I think that's a more interesting experience than one object that explains everything.

Q: Are you afraid of art created by programs that humans set up, or optimistic about it? After all, the Frankenstein quote at the end of the speech is saying that humans have limits, and shouldn't push too far past their own boundaries.

M: Across the whole exhibition, what we look at is the context humanity faces: our past, and our future. Placing ourselves in that context, and asking where we came from, and how and where we should survive and go in the future.

From my own point of view, this connects to a particular historical background, and to the problems brought by the global ecological crisis and political crisis. I have genuinely come to see, as Frankenstein says, that a certain limit exists within humanity. We have to recognize that limits exist.

Of course, Mary Shelley's reasons for writing may be somewhat different from my reasons for making this robot and this exhibition. Mary Shelley wrote the story at a gathering in Geneva, where she met many different people and everyone wrote a story — so it was a bit like a form of entertainment.

But I think what I want to do is try to deal with these questions related to civilization. We're all struggling with an idea — that perhaps in the near future, we will no longer be able to survive in a simple way.

I have even discussed this with other people before, obviously with the aim of changing the situation. For example, if 5G is installed, it could mean all the insects die. Without insects there is no food, and then the birds die. You know, it's these simple things we keep ignoring. We try to imagine ourselves as the center of the universe — which, from a certain angle, is almost thinking at the level of God.

In fact, it is now proven that we have already reached certain limits.

Q: In 1999 you and your collaborator, the artist Matthew Leahy, made Cave, using the work of more than 30 peers to build a cave out of crumpled brown paper in a basement-like setting. The project space was the home of another artist, Michael Klega. That looks like a "prehistoric project," while this one is a "future project." Are these two projects, set in different times, the result of your thinking about different questions across these 20 years?

M: In my own history, that was definitely an experimental period. That exhibition, too, was originally made in a friend's house. It was an apartment, an ordinary place, a place my friend lived in. He invited me because he was doing a series of exhibitions, and he asked me to do something as well. So I decided to use paper to turn his house into a cave. And I also used a curatorial strategy — borrowing a lot of my friend's works to show inside this "cave."

So [the cave] had different layers too.

The cave is the first place where human or artistic gestures were found, going back to prehistoric times.

It is also the house we live in. We now live in apartments, rather than in the kind of place we would have lived in long ago.

And the whole exhibition was a response to a philosophical idea, like Plato and his "Allegory of the Cave," and the whole relationship inside it. So I explored many different layers in it. And of course, as an artist-curator, I explored my own artistic practice within all those structures.

So in terms of subject matter, or the way the works were shown, that cave and what I am discussing in this exhibition share two underlying, similar questions. Only the form of that exhibition was different from this one.

Q: Between the cave and this exhibition, is there any difference in the atmosphere of the space you create, or anywhere else?

M: That cave — I don't even remember which year exactly I did it.

What I could do, and how I worked, was also a little different. Because at that time I was not a well-known artist. I didn't have many chances to show in large museums or institutions.

I think the method is very similar, but the actual form the ideas take is different. [The cave] was an exhibition I made almost entirely by myself. In a way, I created all these very complex environments. Now my capabilities are a little different — I can borrow works from the Fondazione Prada, for example, and I'm able to hold an exhibition in China. Those were things I couldn't do as a young artist.

Broadly speaking, as an atmosphere, yes: this is a work set in a completely different cultural background.

Because I am very interested in the atmosphere of a place, since my work is based on environmental context. In a way, I wanted to celebrate the atmosphere of this house. But I also wanted to argue against that context — which is where the sense of friction comes from.

Exhibition Information

Dates: March 23 – June 2, 2019

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday: 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Friday, Saturday: 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.

Closed Mondays

Venue: Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai (186 Shaanxi Road North, Jing'an District)

Admission: 60 yuan

Cover image photographed on site by QDaily at the exhibition, showing To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll