Marie vs. The Machine: An Interview of Marie Davidson

Photo credit: Nadine Fraczkowski


interview by Karly Quadros

In Foucault’s landmark 1975 book Discipline and Punish, he introduced the metaphor of the ‘panopticon,’ a hypothetical prison in which the prisoners are being surveilled at all times while the guards remain unseen in a central tower. Foucault writes, “The panopticon exemplifies the power dynamics present in modern institutions, where individuals are subjected to surveillance and discipline, leading to self-regulation and conformity.” With the advent of smart phones, social media, the sale of personal data, and large language models, the panopticon has endured as a metaphor for our times when it feels as though nothing is ever truly private.

Marie Davidson is throwing a rave in the panopticon’s tower.

With her new record City of Clowns, out today on Soulwax’s Deewee imprint, Davidson shifts her sardonic satire away from the club and towards Big Tech. Inspired by Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Davidson brings her signature hypnotic deadpan to ten songs skewering tech’s encroachment into our daily lives. 

There’s “Demolition” where she appropriates the voice of tech companies that extract personal data for profit. She sounds like a hungry vampire when she sings, “I’ve got to know you / inside and out” and, more directly, “I don’t want your cash anymore / all I want is you / I want your data, baby.” In “Statistical Modeling,” a robotic drone intones calmly over a cold electro beat. Then there’s “Y.A.A.M.” (that’s short for “your asses are mine” for all those following at home.) Inspired by a condescending email Davidson received regarding the business side of the music industry, she penned the propulsive club track to get it through our thick skulls and stiff bodies that it’s not about a brand or a sponsored post – it’s about the music. “Entrepreneurs and producers and freelancers to managers / the whole wide world of bravados, upset liars, and insiders / Give me passion, give me more, I want your asses on the floor,” she sings.

Picking up where her sweat-it-out anthem and previous Soulwax collaboration “Work It” left off, Davidson’s music is never overwrought or heavy handed. Her writing is terse, the beats tensely coiled. She’s cool headed and funny. The artist, she says, is a “sexy clown,” at once meant to entertain and critique. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that she is ambivalent to technology (Davidson didn’t own a laptop until 2016.) She’s part harbinger, part siren, here to remind us of that most important rule of online life: if you’re getting it for free, you are the product.

KARLY QUADROS: ‘Sexy clown’ is such an evocative concept. I can’t tell if it’s an insult or a compliment. Where did it come from?

MARIE DAVIDSON:  You get the vibe. It's an insult and a compliment at the same time. It portrays how I felt when I was writing the song, and it mirrors my experience of being a woman entertainer. 

QUADROS: So you're the sexy clown. 

DAVIDSON: I'm the sexy clown. But there are other sexy clowns in this world. The clown is the person that stands a bit on the side, on the fringe of society. A person who has the power to question the status quo. The clown is someone that can’t be ridiculed. In Tarot cards, within the position of the clown, you have the trickster. In French, the name of the card is ‘fou,’ It has this double entendre. ‘Are you a fou?’ in French means, ‘Are you crazy?’

QUADROS: It’s like in medieval times the concept of ‘jester’s privilege.’ The jester was the only one who could criticize the king but only because he himself was foolish.

DAVIDSON: And at the risk of getting your head cut off if you were not found funny!  It comes back to the role of an artist these days. It’s to entertain people and question, criticize. But if what you do is not well perceived you'll be left out. 

QUADROS: So who's the king?

DAVIDSON: The king for me is the structures of power, whether it's in branding or in politics, politicians, spokespeople, influencers. The king is ever evolving, but the king is always the money, right? If you want to know who's the king, you have to follow the money. 

QUADROS: That’s often how I see your work. You’re a very funny critic of capitalism, the commercialization of nightlife, and club culture, especially in 2016’s Adieux Au Dancefloor. Do you see this album as a kind of sequel?

DAVIDSON: It’s a continuation, but I wouldn’t say it’s a sequel. It’s in the same journey. With this album, I’m really stepping out of just questioning club culture, and I’m questioning the world we live in, especially technology and politics.

QUADROS: The visuals you have for “Demolition” are fascinating. They incorporate AI, right?

DAVIDSON:  They're made by an artist named Christopher King. He’s a really good musician, but he does AI art under the moniker of Total Emotional Awareness.

Pierre [Guerineau, Davidson’s husband], who is a co-producer on the record, and I worked with Chris a few times in our lives before. He's done a music video for our project called Essai Pas back in 2018 for our album, New Path.

This time we asked him to work with AI because the song “Demolition” talks about Big Tech and surveillance capitalism and what happens with the collection of our data and eventually the analysis of our data to predict behavior and tailor our taste and our will and, in the end, our decision-making in general.

We decided to go for AI art because it showed this very well. In the song the voice I am doing is not Marie. It's the voice of tech and surveillance capitalism. I'm voicing the people who own the AI, the AI itself and the algorithm. I'm voicing the culture of data accumulation. Nothing else could have shown this better than AI art. 

When you use the term ‘art,’ it means that there's a human interaction to it. AI itself cannot do art on its own. It can produce an image, but to make art, it needs an aesthetic decision-maker, which has to be a human. First I gave Chris some keywords that were based on my lyrics, but also my reflections on the world right now, and he gave that to the AI algorithm. Then it gave back something and we said, “Okay, that's interesting, but it's not quite it.” And then we gave some more directions to Chris, so he would feed his algorithm. So it really questions, what is art? Who did it, the AI or the human? It was a nice reversal of what I'm talking about in “Demolition” in which we took control for this moment with the technology to make visuals for our music. 

QUADROS: Did you use AI for the music itself?

DAVIDSON: No, no, not at all. That has to be authentic still.

For me I'm very reluctant to use AI for my music, but I understand why people do it and I'm really not against it. I'm just not interested because we have so much technology everywhere right now. If, in my music making, I can rely only on human decisions, I'm happy. 

QUADROS: As much as you write about technology, you seem to still really hold close to authenticity as an ideal.

DAVIDSON:  I'm not a big tech person in general. Even in my music, I make most of my music on hardware, and then I work with co-producers in Ableton, with Pierre, and then at Deewee with David and Steph working in ProTools.

QUADROS: Is it true that you didn’t get a laptop until 2016?

DAVIDSON: Yeah, it’s true. I’m just a bit old school when it comes to that.

I’m not old school in all spheres of my life, but I’m just not naturally attracted to new technologies. I use Instagram for my career. I dislike it, but I think I use it well.

In 2024, I started a newsletter to come back to the medium of writing long form because I was frustrated with the short form, fast, instant gratification models of social media, especially Meta. I don’t use TikTok, so I don’t really know how it works. I’ve seen it on some friends’ phones. It looks too fast for me. It’s very short, and I’m a long form person.

QUADROS: How’s the newsletter been? Has it changed the way that you write or connect with your audience?

DAVIDSON: It’s improving my writing. I do it because I love writing. And I write in English, which is my second language. There’s an extra challenge there, but it helps me improve my vocabulary. I love language, and it’s really pushing me to look at words in a new way.

QUADROS: Can you tell me about the beginnings of City of Clowns? What is your writing process like?

DAVIDSON: For me, it was not an intent to return to club music, but an intent to return to making electronic music on my own and with other people. There’s only two tracks that can truly be called club tracks: “Contrarian” and “Statistical Modeling,” which is my take on electro. I’d say “Fun Times” and “Sexy Clown” are electronic pop music. They have verses and choruses. The opening [“Validations Weight”] and the closer [“Unknowing”] are much more album-oriented.

QUADROS: When you’re writing, do you start with the music or the words?

DAVIDSON: It goes both ways. When I started, I was reading this book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. I was going back slowly to making my own music. I had a few tracks but no straight direction. I was reading the book on a trip to Europe, vacation not work, and I read a lot on the plane coming back to Montreal. I was like, this is really inspiring. It’s really alarming. It’s a really juicy subject. It’s important that people get more awareness about this. It’s really when I got into reading this book that I had the drive to make an album. 

QUADROS: That book is interesting because it’s not just about what these Big Tech companies and the government do to us, but also how people internalize surveillance and start to surveil each other. That’s something that really comes across in your music – people that are clout chasers or who make art that’s more generic because they want it to be more appealing on social media.

DAVIDSON: “Y.A.A.M.” talks a bit about this. Not only have people internalized this, but a lot of people have not internalized it – it’s just become a part of their lives and they have integrated it without acknowledging it. And it dictates the way they evolve and their decision making, but they’re not even aware. 

We are artists. You’re a writer. You’re probably an artist yourself or in touch with art. We’re in a  portion of society still used to generating our own thinking and being critical. I think there’s a lot of people who aren’t even aware that this has reshaped our society. They’re partaking, like “it’s great! It’s convenient. Google, tell me where to go. Siri, answer my question.”

And it just makes us lazier. There’s this obsession with convenience and progress. Everything’s always justified with progress. And if you’re not partaking, you’re an idiot because you’re just staying backwards. You’re stuck in the past. Well, says who? What is actual progress? It frees us from some specific tasks, but what’s the trade off? If the trade off is actually more expensive than the satisfaction of not doing the task, is it really progress? Are we really progressing as a species or are we getting lazier and losing our ability to reflect and act on our own will?

QUADROS: We get lazier, but we also lose the satisfying parts of our lives and our jobs too. It’s obviously a problem with journalism but with creative fields as well.

DAVIDSON: To be a musician now, you have to be an influencer. You have to be a model, an actress, a comedian, a spokesperson for this cause. Just being a musician nowadays doesn’t work. You’re doing music, so what? What’s your brand? What’s your angle?

QUADROS: How do you deal with that?

DAVIDSON: I’m a creative person, so I don’t mind being a lot of things, but I really hate the branding around it. I hate the feeling that I have to be a content provider. All the entities in the music industry, they will ask you for content, like the music itself is not content anymore. You have to create content if you want your music to be heard.

QUADROS: I think one of the reasons why people continue to pay for Spotify or scroll through TikTok is because they feel trapped by their pleasures. And that seems to be a cycle of modern life that you write into a lot: binge and purge, work and then burnout.

DAVIDSON: They’re trapped by their need for things to be convenient. The culture is promoting a very paternalizing thing, that you need to be taken charge of. People feel very vulnerable to make up their own minds, to be creative and come up with their own ideas of how to entertain themselves and how to fill time.

QUADROS: Do you think you’ve found a way out of this problem?

DAVIDSON: I read a lot and write. After dinner, I don’t look at screens. I still love watching movies, but I’ll watch it before I eat. I might reply to a text message, especially if it’s not about work, like to a friend or my parents or loved ones, but I don’t work after dinner. I don’t partake in screen interactions, so no movies, no scrolling, social media, no emails. If I listen to music, I make the screen black. 

We don’t all have the same needs and the same urgencies, but I think as humankind, we need to decide for ourselves what we want and what we don’t want and cultivate critical thinking. The biggest dangers of social media and the Internet is the polarization and the increasing erasure of facts. Nobody knows what the truth is anymore, which creates a climate of fear, angst, and violence, in which a very small number of powerful people are benefiting and starting to rewrite what democracy is. That’s extremely alarming. So whether you’re into club culture or not, whether you use AI or not, the bottom line is, as humankind, we need to keep nurturing critical thinking.


City of Clowns is out today on Deewee Records.

An Interview of OpenAI’s First Artist in Residence, Alexander Reben

first artist in residence of OpenAI

Installation view of Disruptive Reflexivity in the Flux of Becoming (2024) in the Write a convoluted exhibition title for Alexander Reben’s show in the basement of the Charlie James Gallery exhibition. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.



interview by Mia Milosevic


MIA MILOSEVIC: Can you talk a little bit about your timeline as an artist and as a scientist, from attending MIT and studying social robotics and applied math to becoming an artist?

ALEXANDER REBEN: I'm not sure there's a point where one becomes an artist, or if it’s just always happening. Certainly, even in research I was doing creative things and my thesis work while in social robotics was also looking at filmmaking and documentaries and how people open up to and respond to technology in different ways. Even as an undergrad I had a couple exhibitions. I'd say it has always been in parallel. All my education was more on the science, engineering, and math side of things, but I’ve always been interested in creativity.

MILOSEVIC: Can you speak on your creative process for your current show at Charlie James Gallery? 

REBEN: The process is quite different for every work. I'm almost as much a process or conceptual-based artist as I am a technology-based artist. It doesn't fit really into any of those camps. I mean, if it was very conceptual, then the object wouldn't matter, it's really just the idea. But to me, the object does still matter. A lot of what I'm talking about is process, because some of what I'm talking about are issues and ideas around automation, which in itself is about how objects are made. Where are the human and the machine coming together? In this show in particular there's quite a wide variety of works through various years.

I think the oldest piece in there is probably Deeply Artificial Trees, the “Deep Dream” video, that I have from back in the day. The newest work is the large metal sculpture I made with the big robots and Machina Labs, Disruptive Reflexivity in the Flux of Becoming. As well as the speaking dental phantom, Artificial Musings of the Null Mind. Some works come because there's an interesting new modality to working with technology. Some of the works come just from random thoughts that I think are interesting, or I think it's something that the public should experience in some way because it could be an upcoming thing that might be changing how folks work with technology.

MILOSEVIC: Did you collaborate with ElevenLabs for Artificial Musings of the Null Mind?

REBEN: I wouldn't call it a collaboration, but they helped me with credits. It was my voice that was trained on ElevenLabs. I had AI generate kind of idle, empty thoughts and musings that the work continuously spurts out. Some of them are quite hilarious and funny. Some of them are poignant and meaningful. Some of them are kind of ridiculous and wrong. (laughs) It's a conglomeration of a bunch of technology, the actual physicality of it is an antique from the 1940s and 50s where they would use these aluminum and steel phantoms to practice dentistry. The ones they have today are plastic and silicone. It speaks to an artificial human simulacrum for scientific use which is being repurposed here.

MILOSEVIC: In your artist bio for Charlie James Gallery, it says you “spent over a decade creating work that probes the inherently human nature of the artificial.” How can we demarcate the difference between the real and artificial? 

REBEN: Part of what I mean in the bio is that technology is inherently human, right? It's very much what we make. It's not like spurting randomly out of nature, it's the way we interface with and modify the world, and we wouldn't be who we are today if we didn't have technology. We probably wouldn't have evolved the way we have without inventing even like, taking a bone back in the day and using it as a tool could be considered a technology, or that's kind of an artificial use of something. It led to being able to hunt better, get more protein, which led to things like inventing science and philosophy and language.

We're fundamentally who we are because of the things that we invent and come up with. I think technology is often seen as a separate thing from us for some reason. We feel like it's a different thing, but to me, it's the physical manifestation of humanity. If you look at it through that lens, I think you can analyze it and appreciate it in different ways and look at how it affects you personally. It’s also something that means very specific things to different folks, and everyone uses technology in different ways. 

 

Alexander Reben
Artificial Musings of the Null Mind
Antique dental phantom, microphone, amplified speaker, truss, electronics
Dimensions variable
2024
Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

 

MILOSEVIC: Can you speak on your just experience as being an of the first artist and residence at OpenAI and what still makes you excited about some of the things you worked on there?

REBEN: I have been working with OpenAI and folks internally since about 2019. I got access to GPT Beta back then before it was public, even before Chat GPT was a thing. That's where I made the plungers piece, A Short History of Plungers and Other Things That Go Plunge in the Night. I was getting GPT to write these ridiculous but fun wall labels. It was kind of just a natural shift for my relationship with them. It was just more like, Hey, maybe we should allow Alex to come in and produce some physical work. I think that for OpenAI it was also kind of a trial to have an artist come in and be hands-on like that.

While I was there, I really focused on tool building, because then I could use those later on after the residency. So there were three main things I worked, the first being a way to produce these massive, high-resolution AI images using outpainting. They're super huge works which I print out at like 1200 DPI, so the details are higher than the eye can see. I thought it'd be interesting to create something with AI that was super complex, super detailed, really high-resolution, sort of getting away from the single image, but also doing something that would be near impossible to do by hand just because of the sheer amount of detail in that image.

That was the theme I wanted to continue with the other tools, using AI as a tool to go past what I might be able to do or others might be able to do on their own. The second thing I had worked on and am still working on is this idea of a conceptual camera, so using photography as an interface versus language. I built a little app for myself that has multiple modes and in one mode you can take a picture of a group of objects and it will come up with a wall label to justify that group of objects as an artwork. It'll print out a wall label with all the info you would need to call that thing an artwork.

There's another mode where you can take a picture of something and it will reinterpret that thing as an absurd situation of whatever that thing is, and then print out a Polaroid of that. In another mode you can make a sketch or a drawing and take a picture of it and it will reinterpret that sketch or drawing as a scene. The reason I called it a conceptual camera is because whatever you take a picture of it translates it into another language as it tries to describe that image.

Once you're in that language space, you can change settings of that image with concepts. So you can be like, given this description, make it more absurd. That's something that a camera usually can't do. You can think of it like a physical knob, like you'd have for exposure. Instead it’s a serious-to-absurd scale that you could tweak, which to me was very interesting because it became a camera that doesn't really do what usual cameras do. I'm still playing around with all the different ways to use that, but I think that just kind of speaks to the ways I think AI is gonna be used in the future. It's gonna plug into a lot more of the natural and creative interfaces folks can use beyond just writing text.

The last thing I worked on was using Sora video to create clips of sculptures that would rotate around their center. If you make things that rotate around their center, you can use computational photography, specifically things like NeRF, which is an NVIDIA algorithm, to extract the 3D model from those viewpoints. The interesting thing I found about Sora was that it preserved relationships and 3D outputs, so you actually could pull a 3D model out of the video. I did that for a few sculptures and did a few 3D prints of those. 

This process still needs a human with knowledge of 3D editing to go and turn that into a usable, high-resolution entity. That sculpture was given to Monumental Labs, which does robotic marble carving, and it was turned to a large-scale marble. We're not too far from text-to-object, which I investigated with those big robots and the sheet metal, now on view at Charlie James Gallery

first artist in residence of OpenAI

Alexander Reben
A Short History of Plungers and Other Things That Go Plunge in the Night
Plungers, cotton pigment print, aluminum label holder
Dimensions variable
Edition of 5 and 2 APs
2020
Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

MILOSEVIC: I know Sora is expected to be released relatively soon. How do you expect it to be integrated into the global artistic landscape?

REBEN: I know everyone in Hollywood is keeping a strong eye on this. There's still a lot of work to be done in that space in order for it to be used for cinematic, full-length work. But my guess is it's just a matter of time before the tools get good enough for those sorts of things as well.

MILOSEVIC: What would you say AI creates space for more of?

REBEN: There's a lot of resources being put towards this technology. Not everything is gonna make it into the future, but a lot of it probably will. And like the web, it's gonna influence society in a huge way. Similar to the Industrial Revolution, it’s about this automation of thinking. The Industrial Revolution was really about automation of the physical.

The more interesting things revolve around how to expand your own creative practice and your own knowledge. My hope is that it allows people like that to be more creative, to speed up maybe their process, and allow them to do more of what they want to do. I also think on the flip side, folks who don't have artistic backgrounds who might wanna express themselves can use it as a tool to do that. The sketch-to-image mode of the conceptual camera really blows a lot of people's minds because it just doesn't take just the exact sketch you make, it tries to get the idea of what you're trying to express from your sketch and then make an image of that. It's a way for those folks to come up with ways to communicate with others where it might have been hard for them before.

MILOSEVIC: I wanted to go back for a second to A Short History of Plungers and Other Things That Go Plunge in the Night, which I know has received a lot of media coverage. The piece is accompanied by the philosophy of “Plungism” which is defined as when “the mind of an artist is in a state of flux and able to be influenced by all things, even plungers.” I feel like it speaks to a lot of people's fears about the application of AI to art, where maybe artists become too easily susceptible to the mind of some foreign entity.

REBEN: Yeah, that label's funny because that was like GPT-2 Beta before it was out there. And funny enough, the reason it’s a repeated plunger multiple times is a result of a bug they had in the model. So even the little mistakes or dead ends, things in these models create fun outputs—less useful if you're trying to write a resume, more useful if you're trying to do creative writing.

At the end of the day, these systems are like pattern machines. They learn from the internet, right? The question I would pose is: Is the interpretation an AI makes of an artwork any more or less valid than the interpretation a curator or writer makes of a work? And if not, where's the distinction? 

MILOSEVIC: Our most recent issue that has just come out is called Citizen, it's all about citizenship and all what it means to be a citizen right now in the current climate. Could you talk about how AI makes you not only a better artist, but maybe even a better citizen, or what that might look like for people?

REBEN: Because I'm an artist who's always worked with technology, my work is about technology. AI is making me a better artist in so much that it's giving me a new, very interesting thing to dig into and work with. It's more that it's just an extremely fruitful thing to look at and research and think about. I think there's a lot of hype out there right now, so we’re still coming to terms with how it's making me a better citizen. If it's makes people more inquisitive, gets 'em to ask more questions, or allows them to learn or research things better or just become more educated, I feel like that's really a lot of what makes a better citizen.

MILOSEVIC: I think your work has just made a positive correlation between art and these innovations of technology that people have generally found frightening. 

REBEN: I try to stick to the neutral to slightly positive route. I do have work that questions, Do we actually want this thing? Do we want this to be this way? How do you want this to go? My work doesn't look to answer questions specifically, because how you experience technology is a very different thing from how I experience it and what it means in your life is different from what it means in mine. It's a highly personal question. At the end of the day, what do you want from technology?