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Geoffrey Lillemon constantly defines new aesthetics and visionary ideas, driving a strong, future-minded approach to his art. The Amsterdam-based artist has a profoundly personal approach to using CGI and media art, which translates into unexpected expressions and commentary on the human condition, human life, mortality and anything in between. We visited Geoffrey at his home studio/gym to interview him and talk about his artistic process with new technologies, his work on show at Nxt Museum Amsterdam, and the role of the artist in the age of AI.

Geoffrey Lillemon at Nxt Museum

Nxt: How do you define yourself as an artist?

GEOFFREY: I’ve always worked with digital art and emerging technologies, always combining them in unexpected ways. So you could say I’m a new technology artist who applies it to the current mood. The current mood right now is the gym aesthetic. That’s why we’re sitting in my home gym. The current mood at the Nxt Museum is a piece called ‘Simulation in Blue’. Let’s see what the mood is for the rest of these questions.

Tell us about Simulation in Blue.

GEOFFREY: ‘Simulation in Blue’ is a performance piece that’s created digitally. That’s why it’s at Nxt Museum, and that’s why I’m not dancing on a stage every day. The idea is to use digital art, especially with the unexpected results of AI, to be a performance vehicle of some sort – one that’s reminiscent of 1980s jazz performances. And one that creates this nostalgia of being in a show, but uses new approaches to visual art to simulate a show.
The name ‘Simulation in Blue’ is a wordplay on Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’, a very famous jazz record from the 1960s. I chose that title because, for me, that record was a completely new branch into a new territory of artistic expression. It had a big impact on me. 

The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

NXT: How do you connect this new artistic expression to AI and digital art?

GEOFFREY: We’re on the same cusp with new technologies and AI, which allow us to redefine what performance can be. It enables this idea of being a voyeur, of looking at the machine that speaks to us in unpredictable ways. It can veer in unexpected directions, similar to jazz music, allowing a structure and flow to accommodate abstraction and soloing. My exploration of technology right now runs parallel to this idea.

The interesting thing about AI and digital art is that it allows us to make unexpected combinations. We can make performances that are performed by a machine instead of people. We can combine aesthetics that are not traditionally brought together, and that’s why I’m calling this a genre of Cinderella jazz: we’re having Cinderella fairytale aesthetics, mixed with holographic light effects, mixed with jazz. These are categories of visual and performative expression, kind of whimsical, dreamy, imaginary visual scapes that you normally would never see together. And I like that. I like that we can play with the unexpected. 

That’s why I’m talking about digital art, fairytales, jazz, and sitting in a gym. These unexpected combinations create unexpected results. 

The idea is not to feel threatened by new technology, but to react to it and see where there is opportunity for expression,  your soul will find its way in.

What would you say is your role as an artist when working with AI and the role of AI in your work? 

GEOFFREY: You’re tapping on the question of the hour: what is the artist’s agency when we have this intervention of AI in production and art? That question is deep, and how I see it is that you can always sacrifice your soul and your heart into the art in some way. It might not be through the labour of craftsmanship of drawing and sculpting in a traditional context, or animating in a frame-by-frame traditional way.

I think we’re feeling threatened by something that we like to do as artists. We like these production practices—there’s something very romantic about sitting and allowing the craftsmanship and the hand-by-hand work to allow one to get in touch with oneself and create meaningful art. But I think when we have AI assisting us and taking over some of the responsibilities of art production, it allows us to go deeper, to where we can sacrifice the human condition and soul into the expression.

That can happen in many different ways. It could be by working on a poetic intervention, or working on how you’re feeling and using that to spend more time in this inner dialogue, but then when it comes to the actual execution of it, you have the aid of AI to help you express yourself. Or it could be like I’m gonna force myself for every single artificially generated asset that I need, that I have to do 50 bench presses, and then that’s gonna open up a different thought pattern. So you can spend more time allowing yourself to get into an honest introspective headspace, rather than which button I click or how I draw like this.

I like using these tools when working on a very technical craft. I’ve been doing this for many years, so I would say that I am very technical in all aspects of traditional 3D production, traditional animation, character design, painting, sculpting, and these kinds of production approaches. This allows me to be submissive in my use of AI.

Picasso said that you need to know the rules to break them. So, I think it’s still very important to understand the traditional methods of work, but then use that to do something unexpected with AI, and then you still have meaning as a human. And then, at some point, we all evolve into machines, and we won’t even know it, so it won’t be a problem.

The Art of the Unexpected: Chaos and Unpredictability as Tools

Let’s talk more about the musical genre of Cinderella jazz, which you describe as improvisational and chaotic. How does your exploration of AI tools fit in with this chaos and improvisation? 

GEOFFREY: The chaos of jazz soloing and the magic of the Cinderella fairy tale run along the same line as the chaos and unpredictability of AI. In conversations around AI, we often hear that you need to see it from a curatorial perspective. It’s not as much about editing as it is about dancing with AI.. You could say it’s a form of dancing where you’re continuously swapping roles. I like that you choose when to let something be dominant versus letting it control you. That’s how you make it feel real. 

But just like with Cinderella jazz (besides that just being obviously a fairy tale that has its own kind of story to it), I like the idea that with AI, we’re trying to slip something into the slipper, trying to force it to fit. Like Cinderella’s evil sisters. It’s like trying to force something to work, but it doesn’t always work. There’s a synergy to finding the perfect fit, and then I think that’s what we’re dealing with. 

Artificial Intelligence forces us to ask the question, “How do we make something come to life from a tool that is inherently based on everybody, based on all the data in the world, but doesn’t have its own soul? 

How do we fit into the right shoe?” That comes with a lot of amazing discoveries and frustrating obstacles.

For one, AI doesn’t have a very good sense of rhythm. When it comes to musicality, finding ways to create structure out of something that’s so chaotic becomes quite a big challenge. That’s why the rules of jazz apply very well. You have to have a structure and a beat, then you can allow for abstraction and chaos on top of that, and it remains a beautiful experience.

Do you feel like that synergy between humans and AI is understood by the viewer in your work? Or is it even important for you that they see this aspect?

GEOFFREY: I think you would feel it more if it were wrong or not done well. When it feels right, you don’t even know what’s going on. When it feels wrong, it becomes evident. If people can go in there and stay in the fairy tale of a Cinderella fitting her foot in the perfect shoe, and not feel the awkwardness of the evil sister trying to force it into the shoe. If the audience has the experience of performance amongst the chaos of jazz and the chaos of AI – and still comes out feeling good – then it’s the right fit. Then you get back in your pumpkin, and you exit through the gift shop at midnight.

Explorations of nostalgia and of speculative sci-fi futures can sound like opposites, yet you merge both of these in your artwork. What is the role of tech in recreating nostalgia?

GEOFFREY: The role of technology and nostalgia, I think, is a lot about contrasts. Contrast is what makes art interesting. How we have something that’s very lo-fi has sort of a memory of a different era, makes us something highly futuristic, highly cold, so it’s a lot about warm and cold. It’s about something that feels human and raw and rough, versus something that feels cold and polished and technical. I think it’s all about making contrasts, and I think that’s why this idea of nostalgia becomes important. It’s part of the human condition to want to have something that’s new and fresh but still feels real and has a heartbeat to it.

What do you want your viewers to feel when they see ‘Simulation in Blue’? 

GEOFFREY: What I would like people at Nxt Museum to feel is that it’s real—to go in there and feel that they’ve gone to a real performance with characters that they’ve identified with, characters that they like or dislike, and ultimately, that they leave with the feeling that they went to a real show, a real concert.

 

On July 10, join us at Nxt Museum for an Artist Talk with Geoffrey Lillemon and Gabey Tjon a Tham, diving into their creative practice and our current exhibition ‘Still Processing’.

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