Speed Knows Nothing Without Fear

Bruno Smith’s Speed Knows Nothing Without Fear

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In Smith’s work, the apocalypse is an ongoing, overlapping process, a never-ending series of distinct but similarly dramatic (if ultimately anticlimactic) events, the extinction of the Neanderthal, 9/11, the financial crash of 2008, the feeling of the end of the world without the satisfaction of its finality. 

So often in history, one culture’s annihilation is another culture’s incipience, making the significance of any apocalyptic event totally subjective within the ludicrous plotlessness of actuality. Smith uses the first, but now rarely used, image generating AI, Dall.E mini, to make his paintings. Does the first image-generating AI mark an end or a beginning in the timeline of human creativity? 

For Smith, this ambiguity is generative. By inviting the AI into the art process, he turns out a bizarro-world version of the apocalypse as overlapping and excessive. Dogs made of flowers hit the Twin Towers. Melty-faced Steve Jobs peers at us from an alcove of fern-like plants and sand art spiderwebs. Various Neanderthals gaze upon various disappointing Eiffel Towers, two obsolete bodies sizing each other up. 

Playing with the tools of our own demise in this permanently precarious stage, where it’s hard to distinguish the end of the world as we know it from the beginning of a new one

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