More is Law X32

The titles More is Law X32 and More is Law X64 elude to Moore’s Law, which models the advancement of microprocessors and in consequence the exponential speed of computer processing. Viewed graphically, Moore’s law shows a doubling of processor capacity every 2 years (hence X32, X64 and so on), a trajectory that can be compared with increasing company profits and decreasing employment rates. Modernist projections of a future in which computers would free society from unproductive labour and instead nurture the humanist ideals of freedom and reason have become derailed. Processor speed has accelerated our work patterns and exposes our fallibility as logic machines. The conclusion to this as contemporary futurists postulate is singularity, the leap from animal intervention with tool to the cataclysmic point at which the human mind is digitised and uploaded to a supercomputer. The screen prints More is Law X32 and More is Law X64 represent a visual metaphor for this socio/technological evolution. Each print depicts small group of people staring with intrigue and fascination at a subject. These heavily half-toned images are stills taken from Bert Haanstra’s 1966 film of Evoluon, a science museum funded by the Phillips electrical company in Eindhoven. The original subject that captured their attention in the Evoluon has been replaced with a tin can in one and a can opener in the other, each of which are superimposed respectively with X32 and X64 in bold red text. Innocent and open-minded fascination for a technological future becomes dislocated from its Modernist context and is confronted with a numbing provocation: to open the can. Whilst in some ways this remains enigmatic, it certainly suggests an unknown, perilous, potentially synthetic outcome.