Southern Interior is erotica by a machine, for machines and machine adjacent readers.
It is a short story written entirely by Sirena V.032021, the first neural network and natural language processing (NLP) model Chan programmed and trained. The Borgesian like story is told through a looped sequence of QR codes. Physically impossible sexual positions, gender dysphoria, tense disagreements, and a peculiar correlation between the perverse and the divine are featured in Southern Interior. Such sentiments are typically treated as “noise” in NLP research and corporate machine learning sectors. Here, it is the only signal that matters.
From the outset of his career, Paul Chan (b. 1973) has worked simultaneously in a number of different fields: from art to technology to political organizing. He is known for varied practices that range from animated video projections to charcoal drawings, public performances, and haunting pneumatic sculptures—and for founding the path breaking independent art book press Badlands Unlimited in 2010. Badlands was the first and only art book press to accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment at the 2011 New York Art Book Fair. The Badlands Crypto Group was established in 2016, and held workshops to educate New York artists and writers about the risks and benefits of crypto like Bitcoin and Ethereum. In 2018, the group led by Chan presented “What is Crypto: For artists, writers, the incarcerated, and anyone else too afraid or embarrassed to ask” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, arguably the first public lecture at a major American art institution devoted to the history and technology of crypto and how it impacts the lives of artists. Badlands has published over fifty books and editions. Badlands’ roster includes Marcel Duchamp, Yvonne Rainer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Martine Syms, Dread Scott, among many others.
He is the winner of the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize and his work has been featured in international group exhibitions such as Documenta 13, the 53rd Venice Biennale, and the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Solo exhibitions have been mounted at The Cycladic Museum of Art, Athens (2018), The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2009); the New Museum, New York (2008) and The Serpentine Gallery, London (2007). His work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among many other public and private institutions. Paul Chan lives and works in New York.