Christopher Kulendran Thomas & Joshua Citarella

Joshua CitarellaI’ve been sitting here for almost an hour, mesmerized by this extraordinary video work Peace Core (sphere) [2024]. Can you tell me about the video segments?

Christopher Kulendran ThomasThe footage shown on these twenty-four screens was broadcast on American TV channels on the morning of September 11, 2001, in the moments before the news of the first plane flying into the World Trade Center showed up on TV. So, in the work, you never really see what happens next. You might see, for example, a morning show host hurriedly cutting to a commercial break saying that they’ll be back with breaking news. But they never come back from that commercial break—it’s an infinite commercial break in a way. The soundtrack is made by continually recombining the sound and music that was broadcast on TV that morning into a kind of vaporwave soundscape that endlessly remixes itself. And the video is algorithmically auto-edited, continually in sync with that ever-evolving soundscape. This footage—I just can’t stop watching it because it captures this kind of innocence that I don’t even know is possible to experience anymore. It’s a feeling you might know if you were alive in the West during the decade that preceded this moment, when it was possible to believe that history had ended and that liberal democracy would prevail forever and bring peace and happiness to all of humanity. Of course, that was an illusion, but it was a plausible one at that time. I wanted to capture that feeling and extend it infinitely.

JCThere’s a particular type of nostalgia, for lack of a better term, the feeling while watching this of returning to a period that is now impossible. From 1989 up until 9/11, there was a broad assumption, certainly in the West, that we were slowly moving toward this increasingly progressive democratizing process, that history itself would just carry out this teleological process, and we’d all eventually arrive at utopia, like good Protestants. I had an episode on the podcast recently where I talked to someone who is, let’s say, very ideologically close to the current administration, and they described their utopia as being 1999, which was incredible because—she didn’t know this—in the movie The Matrix, they are simulating 1999 in perpetuity [laughter]. So, the general assumptions of the liberalism that we all grew up with are most pronounced here.

CKTPeak America. Peak television.

JCTotally. But post-9/11, the global war on terror sets the stage for a transformation that is still unfolding. For people who are not familiar with your work or your background, can you tell us about your family’s decision to leave Sri Lanka and specifically about the events of May 18, 2009?

CKTMy family left Sri Lanka during the beginnings of the ethnic violence there that became a civil war, so I grew up in London. And when I watched what happened on September 11 on TV, like everyone else, I, of course, had no way of knowing that a kind of knock-on effect would be that where my family is from would cease to exist. The Tamil homeland Eelam had been self-governed for several decades as a de facto autonomous state. But the geopolitical narrative of the “war on terror” that followed 9/11 gave Sri Lanka’s president at the time, [Mahinda] Rajapaksa, the pretext to reframe the Tamil liberation movement as a terrorist organization, and then wipe out Tamil Eelam.

The six paintings—the other body of work in this show—are depictions of certainly the most haunted place that I have ever been, which is a narrow strip of beach in a place called Mullivaikkal on the northeast coast of what is now Sri Lanka. It was onto this little strip of beach that something like a hundred thousand Tamil civilians were marshaled in the final stages of the war there. And on May 18, 2009, this no-fire zone on this beach was made smaller and smaller and smaller and then bombed. We don’t know how many people were killed that day by the Sri Lankan army because there were no outside witnesses. The United Nations was required to leave the country before it happened, and foreign journalists weren’t allowed back in for a long time. So these paintings are not painted from photographs or from any kind of documentary evidence. They’re imagined through the visual language of the colonial history that is in a way a pretext for that violence.

JCCould you tell us about the process of making these paintings with AI, and about the training data that goes into these images and the source materials you’re drawing from?

CKTI originally made these for my show at Wiels in Brussels. Though these were the first paintings where I was explicit about their historical subject matter, they were composed the same way that I compose all my paintings: using a neural network. Together with my studio team, we train our own AI models on the work of successive generations of artists in Sri Lanka—some of the island’s most well-known artists—who have been influenced by the Western canon. Having trained the network on a particular “way of seeing” through the aggregated work of all those artists, I use that network to generate new compositions, which we then paint by hand in my studio in Berlin. The title of each painting is the title of the .png file that it’s a painting of.

JCAnd what about the title of the exhibition as a whole?

CKTThe exhibition is called Peace Core, which is also the name of the centerpiece of the show. I guess that title is, what, a quadruple entendre? There’s the reference to the “core-ification” of successive musical or cultural subgenres—that’s entendre number one. Entendre number two is one specific genre, which could have been the last “core”—Corecore [an art movement that happened on TikTok circa 2022]. The editing algorithm that my studio team programmed to continually reedit the video work in the show was trained on a lot of Corecore videos, for the system to learn a sense of “good taste” in editing (or at least good taste according to me—weird taste, I guess). And then obviously the title’s a play on the US Peace Corps. And then maybe entendre number four is a reference to a work by an artist that you and I are huge fans of: Gretchen Bender’s Dumping Core [1984], which is an incredible work and an inspiration for my Peace Core [2024].

JCTo thread a few of these things together—we are talking about the end of history, the end of this slow progression of liberal democracy and universalisms in the proper liberal sense. As artists, these are very large topics for us to deal with, but we happen to be situated directly in the center of them, because in many ways the individual, unique genius of the artist—at least in the twentieth-century sense—has been held up as evidence of these underlying Enlightenment theories from the Western canon. It’s a very peculiar thing to observe: You start to pull enormous, unprecedented amounts of data from sets that are impossible to memorize from any human subject and then produce things with ultra-fidelity, indiscernible likeness. It leads us to question these underlying philosophical assumptions of the Western canon, of the Enlightenment project, and of the whole idea of a civilization based on liberal democracy.

The technology has reflected an aspect of ourselves that we are maybe made uncomfortable by and were not aware of before. I think what is suggested in these works is a question: What is this horizon of human freedom if we can no longer hold as strongly to the definitions that we were brought up with? I’m going to hand you the biggest question of all. You and I have spent ten years trying to hack away at this: How can we start to approach this twenty-first-century definition of freedom?

CKTWow, that’s a hell of a question. I think on one level my paintings visually embody that twentieth-century idea of freedom, which is based on an idea from the West of the liberated, autonomous individual as the basic unit of society. I’m quite infatuated with that idea of the individual, the idea that we are human and ontologically distinct to everything that’s not human. I think maybe that idea is the foundational psyop of our civilization in that it’s the fiction upon which everything else is based: our economy, our political system, our culture.

But the thing about growing up between two different cultures is that it’s easier to see through both. While I’m certainly infatuated with that idea of the individual—perhaps one of the greatest stories ever told—I also don’t entirely believe it. My paintings have become, for me, a way of seeing through that fiction. What I love about the kinds of tools I use in the collaborative process with my studio team is the way that these paintings channel and compress a huge quantity of influences from beyond myself. So people see things and relate to things that they recognize in my paintings that I’m not even aware are in there. It’s like channeling a collective consciousness. And I’ve come to see my studio as the sort of last-mile delivery algorithm for the network, in that with every mark you make, every seemingly intuitive mark involved in painting these paintings, you’re channeling thousands and thousands of paintings that you’ve seen over years. I guess I’ve come to feel pretty relaxed about where the so-called “individual” ends and where everything else begins—the ecology, the flow, whatever.

To take a stab at your big political question, I think it might become increasingly hard for Western civilization to hang on to this one single idea of freedom. The idea of the individual that it’s based on is unraveling, not just through the technological platform shift with AI, but also perhaps through a shift in the balance of power from the West to the East. I would love for our civilization to get a little bit more comfortable with other civilizations living by their own values, even if we don’t share the same values.

JCAn important challenge to Western individualism was the pandemic, the immunological vision of society where it is difficult to tell where my exhale ends and your inhale begins—a vision that we’re all kind of passing this biological material between us. That was the most abrupt challenge.

Another is AI’s incredible efficacy at making these predictive guesses of human behavior. LLMs [large language models] choose the most likely word that follows another and produce an output that is in many ways indistinguishable from humans’; and they only continue to improve. The philosophical premise of Western liberal democracy is the individual’s capacity for reason. But through the aggregation of data, we start to make extremely accurate predictions about how people actually behave. And we have to question the degree to which we’re making up our own minds. It calls into question our own subjectivity.

CKTI wonder also, in relation to this show, whether the idea of prediction is at odds with the idea of originality. There’s a hard-to-answer question in this technological platform shift we’re talking about: whether predicting infinitely new combinations can actually produce something new. The show takes all these forms from the past—there are multiple eras in the show, be it modernist painting or ’80s video art, or one particular moment in September 2001, or on the 18th of May, 2009, or even the soundtrack that is influenced by vaporwave Internet music from a decade ago, or the editing algorithm that’s trained on Corecore videos from 2022, or whatever. So there are all these elements from the past, but in a way nothing original in the forms that this show inhabits. At the same time, I think that way of synthesizing all these historical forms is probably something particular to our time now. It’s a kind of post-AI way of remixing everything from the past.

Notions of originality and aesthetic innovation are all bound up with this Western idea of historical progression. But people who encounter my paintings without context often imagine at first glance that they might be painted by a much older or dead artist. I like that as an initial response, because when you get closer to the paintings, you start to see combinations of marks that maybe wouldn’t have been plausible from an earlier era. And it’s that kind of subtle historical impossibility in the paintings that I think is a good way to see through the Western fiction of history as a linear continuum.