The Omega Machine

Abstract

The following is the script for a performance developed in tandem with artist and performer Gabe Rubin and painter Jacqueline Humphries for her show jHΩ1:) at Wexner Center for the Arts in October 2021. Humphries’s work blurs the line between the painterly expression and the automated simulacrum. Her paintings in this show included 3D printed blacklight flat sculptures that resemble paintings that use as a base layer text encoded (ASCII) versions of earlier paintings with novel features palimpsestically overwriting them, such as Greek letters, Möbius strips, emoticons, and brand names. Our script ties together Humphries’s innovative practice with debates regarding the relative indeterminacy of the subject in comparison to the algorithm and artificial intelligence – debates which are linked to related questions as to the possibility of chance and spontaneity within seemingly closed discourses such as those interpreted by psychoanalysis, discourses famously encoded by Jacques Lacan into algorithms – and psychoanalysis itself. For the event, we invented a character for Gabe Rubin named Absinthe Omega, a brand ambassador for automated painting, to serve as a queer figure who might dramatize these issues while also fading into and out of the ground of painting itself as if they were a kind of subjectile substrate to these antinomic debates.