For many years, we’ve released an annual artwork. These are always hand crafted by our people or an artist. Here is this year’s piece and the story behind it.
This year’s artwork was created by Kei-Ella. We have worked with Kei before and wanted someone who could bring a more feminine angle to the typical hacking art. We think she did an incredible job, thanks Kei!
The art can just be enjoyed, you don’t need to know or care what our thinking behind it was, nor does it deny you deriving your own meaning from the art. But, if you would like to know what we were thinking, read on!
We like commenting on the state of the world with our art. Last year’s was “Make PR’s not War” emphasising that we can contribute and collaborate instead of kill. This year’s work is a reflection on AI.
There are two figures, human and non-human regarding each other, with the work trying to capture both the place we are with AI and the possible futures. We see the human woman is more fully formed and holding the cybernetic head, however the woman’s hand has become partly cybernetic as we merge, or depending on your take, are infected by it. The AI is represented in the form of a human head, but isn’t human. While we’ve tried to make AI-human like, it’s something else, a non-human intelligence creating an uncanny valley for many as we look on something that can think, but not like us. Surrounding the human we have natural and human made elements that also start to change as they merge with the AI. The question being asked is what will we become? Will we incorporate AI into our ways of being and create a better world everyone has a personal teacher and scientific advances meaningfully improve the lives of billions, or is the AI accelerating us into a dystopia of climate hell and atrophying mental capabilities. This is not a foregone conclusion, and there’s room for both outcomes on the scale.
The text is a nerdy take on the “to be or not to be” soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Aesthetically we wanted to continue the break from traditional hacker art and themes with this – did you ever think you’d see Shakespeare at DEFCON? The soliloquy is delivered by Hamlet in a graveyard while holding a skull and staring into its empty eye sockets that he believes to belong to his dead friend Yorick. It’s a depressive meditation on life and death from someone considering suicide and the struggle of life being ultimately worth it. We’re asking a different question – how do we want to be as humanity in the future. Borrowing from Sci-Fi – will we choose to end our human-ness – is this the start of a singularity moment where millennia from now we no longer resemble the organic humans we once were? Or is this the start of the road towards a Butlerian Jihad were we learn the error of making something in our image with so much agency? If you re-read the soliloquy through this lens – it offers some surprising angles.
We have horizontal and vertical versions of this, and in different colours. The thumb nails below link to slightly higher-res versions if you’d like to use them on your devices.
