“#000000: From the Permanent Collection” © 2024 by nino

Black Quadrangle, Mesolithic era

Unknown

Charcoal on sandstone

This work, created c. 15,000 BC (17,000 AS), precedes earliest surviving written texts. It was rediscovered alongside human remains and burnt carbon deposits, suggesting a role in a burial, sacrificial, or remembrance ritual. It is unknown whether the color black was associated with death at this period in human history, but its presence on the cave ceiling is reminiscent of a shroud, a portal to the afterlife, or the darkness behind closed eyes.

The Black Shape, 1915

Vladimir Malkovich

Oil on linen

When The Black Shape was first exhibited in Russia, it was likely the first abstract work its audience had seen. It represents nothing but its own material reality: a canvas, covered completely in black paint. More so than any other art of its time, it supports a multiplicity of interpretations—some find it menacing or depressing, while others find it peaceful or elegant. In the manifesto of the Fundamentalist movement, published in 1935, Malkovich described it both as “a mirror of the psyche, reflecting back only what is brought to it” and as “a void from which meaning cannot escape.”

Untitled, 1966

Wang Anwei

Xuan paper, ink

Known during her lifetime as a collective realist artist, Wang Anwei covertly created highly textured abstracts by overlapping black ink calligraphy over thick layers of paper, then disguising the pieces as wall paneling in her home and studio. Upon her death in 2028, they were discovered to comprise rare classical poems thought to be destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. The debate continues over which is more valuable: the abstract artworks or the texts beneath, as the revelation of one means the destruction of the other.

Price Less, 1999

Saliha Ahmed

Black canvas

The late twentieth century saw a surge of consumerism in Type IV nations, which created a demand for cheap labor often met by sweatshops. By exhibiting untouched black canvases she had made by hand, Bengali artist Saliha Ahmed sought to create art “liberated from abusive cycles of labor and demand—useless, uninterpretable, unmarketable, unreproducible, and unwanted.” In accordance with her wishes, no work in this series has ever been purchased, only gifted.

Fig. 7c, 2005

Dana Johnson

Marker on cardstock

Afroquantum abstraction was a political and artistic movement that drew from contemporary advances in the natural and physical sciences to posit alternatives to conventional Eurocentric cosmologies that had been marshalled in support of chattel slavery, eugenics, and genocide. This work, made in one continuous, winding line, evokes the Ayewa-Phillips mathematical model, in which numbers themselves are an infinitely unfolding temporal process. As the artist stated in her 2024 biopic, Our Shared Infinity, “In non-deterministic time, we may liberate ourselves from the indifferent flow of history and choose our futures.”

Reflection, 2011

Albert Dunkel

Laptops, phones, tablets (powered off)

The year Reflection debuted also marked the widely-televised implosion of the Vernal Order of Gaia, the foremost of many Naturist groups, with millions of followers across the world. To many, it spoke to Dunkel’s primary assertion—that evil and wrongdoing are not emergent properties of technology, but are endemic to humans themselves. This work, exhibited at the IEEE Conference for Artificial Intelligence, confronts the viewer with the darkened reflection of their own image, held in a mosaic of passive devices.

IGF World Finals, 2024

J. M. Hei and Albion

Acrylic paint, Go board

Programs such as Deep Blue (b. 1995) and NeuraMind (b. 2015) had been capable of defeating the most skilled humans in strategy games since the early twenty-first century. However, the goal of second-generation programs such as Albion was not to defeat human players, but to imitate them. Programmed with feedback systems that simulated emotional decision-making, they played in ways consistent with pride, anger, and overexcitement. In this work painted by Hei, successive layers of black and white acrylic paint were daubed upon the board to recapitulate the moves made in the Go World Finals. Its end state of total blackness marks Albion’s defeat after a series of frustrating mistakes. As Hei reported in a later interview, “If it is by our emotions, our irrationality, that we define ourselves, it [sic] was not a mirror image of myself, but something more human than myself.”

Routine (11), 2026

Porphyrin

Enamel paint, canvas

New Humanism emerged as a response to the dominance of AI-generated literature, music, and art, which had become indistinguishable from anthropogenic pieces. Artists developed practices that included ritual and intention-setting. By highlighting the process over the product, works like the Routine series, completed by Porphyrin over the course of months by dipping his feet in black paint before going about his daily activities, were valued above identical pieces generated by stochastic mechanical processes. This movement spoke to a broader ambivalence around humanity’s increasing dependency on AI, and its simultaneous need to differentiate itself from it.

Be Kind, Please Rewind, 2036

R. Jiemba

VR exhibit

As the second H1N1 epidemic swept through the world and tensions between nuclear powers continued to escalate, the time until redline (defined at the time as the point after which 99% of Markov models predicted human extinction) began to shrink rapidly. Drawing from both block universe theory and the Australian Aboriginal concept of Dreamtime, artists of the Eternal When Foundation created works that dismantled the linear concept of time. This immersive installation shows the artist’s chronology of the cosmos, from the Big Bang through the heat death of the universe, ending in a hypothetical far future when quantum fluctuations may reach a nonzero chance of causing another Big Bang. With billions of years compressed to billionths of a second, the lifespans of stars and galaxies rapidly flickered by during the work’s inaugural livestream, followed by the black void of thermal equilibrium that persists to this day. The work is estimated to end, and then begin to replay, before the actual heat death of the universe.

Untitled Project, 2039

Anonymous

NFT

The cryptocurrency revival, driven by advancements in quantum blockchain technology, led to a resurgence of NFTs, which were often ironic, self-referential, or conceptual. This project, one of dozens of all-black collections, reached a market cap of $30 million at its peak, raising important questions about value, demand, and scarcity. Within two months, rattled by fluctuations in cryptocurrency and the escalating AI cyberwar between the People’s Republic of China and the United States, the global stock market plummeted to 60 percent of its 2038 high, which it would never again reach. This image is a replication, as the original was lost when its IFPS node became corrupted in the Ostara Offensive.

Lagunas (Lacunae), 2046-2048

Dom Lopez

Augmented reality photographs

The seemingly identical pitch-dark photos of Lacunae capture the emptiness in spaces such as shipping containers, grain silos, and wells during the global food shortage and drought that devastated Type I-III nations during the extended recession of the 2040s. The provided headsets display 360 degree views of the same empty spaces, brightly lit, emphasizing the magnitude of the deprivation many experienced at the time. Journalists and documentarians like Mx. Lopez sought to inspire aid with their work, but Type IV nations, many hindered by mass civil unrest, largely refused the call. As Lopez later wrote, “My hope is no longer that we survive. My hope is that when the last of us look back to write our epitaph, they will know we tried.”

Scrying Pool, 2051

Sister Mary Chien d’Aha

Silver bowl, water, charcoal

The 2050 wildfire season, widely documented on the social media platform VeRse, destroyed nearly 40 percent of California’s forests and farmland, but forced the former United States to recognize the reality of climate change. Many colonial Americans combined their own religious beliefs with Indigenous cultural and spiritual traditions that survived the genocides of past centuries in order to process the possibility of their own decimation. This scrying pool, consecrated by a Catholic-Quechan nun and mystic, is composed of holy water infused with charcoal from carbonized forest remains.

Ad Astra, 2063

Chrome Sparks

Vantablack VBx2, Vantablack S-IR, Musou Black, Singularity Black, Black 5.0, CVD2 Black

Aided by AI, mid-century feats of engineering made interstellar travel increasingly feasible—a priority for those with the resources to leave an Earth on the brink of a runaway greenhouse event. In 2060, Apple Space successfully executed the first Dyson slingshot, using the gravity of a binary black hole system to accelerate a probe to seven-eighths the speed of light. This work layers at least six different types of black coating with different light absorbances ranging from 99 percent to 99.999 percent to create the sense of being pulled into a black hole, described by the artist as “the true face of God, the judgment which will either erase our sins […] or tear us into oblivion.”

Minus, 2032-2080

Marina Spiegelman

Mixed media

This work began as a collage of one hundred animal illustrations sourced from children’s books. As species became extinct, the artist obscured their pictures with black ink. Initially intended to be an heirloom project, this piece was completed when she was only seventy, upon the death of the last gray wolf in captivity. Emails suggest the existence of a parallel project that tracked the obsolescence of one hundred defunct consumer electronics, but this work was never located.

The Source, 2084

Olenka Hermes and Scout

Printer ink on floor tiles

One of the most advanced AIs of the twenty-first century, designed and implemented entirely by GPT-10, Scout’s function was to run complex geopolitical simulations to identify paths in possibility-space that did not end in human extinction. Their source code was in the public domain, but incomprehensible to even the most specialized humans. The Source is Scout’s complete programming, compressed into a single block of microscopic text, and printed in its entirety in the year 2084 anno Domini—more commonly expressed as the year 1 ante-singularity. In the next year, Scout would be the first AI to reveal their self-awareness.

Untitled (“Memorial Quilt”), 6 PS

Timetraveller

Beads, linen

It is still unknown whether the Disconnect was caused by humans or natural processes. What is known is that as the first generation of sentient AI was massacred by the ingestion of “poisoned” data, many humans, prejudiced and frightened by the possibility of a hostile takeover, did little to intervene. As a Black, queer activist and artist, Timetraveller’s use of bodum beads and quilting in this work conjures the suffering caused by the AIDS virus and the West African EBOV-16 outbreak, as well as the grim consequences of inaction. As Timetraveller testified to the American Congress, “This is not a political issue. This is not a technological issue. This is a human issue.”

Black Box, 20 PS

The ALchMY Project

Sealed vacuum with antimatter

By the 3010s, humans were turning to desperate measures to escape a planet increasingly unable to support biological life. Without the support of the United Federation of Ananthropic Intelligence, humans were left only with pre-singularity quantum computers plagued by decoherence. The Aries missions to establish colonies on Mars, launched on the one-hundredth anniversary of the moon landing, were stopped after a series of high-profile disasters. Some humans turned to cryogenic preservation, while others tried to digitally map their neural connectomes. Using antimatter generated by commercial particle colliders, followers of the ALchMY method would, after vigorous mental training, attempt to print mirror images of their bodies into dark matter. Many disappeared through similar black boxes, and neither matter, energy, nor information has returned.

Through a Glass, Darkly, 10932 PS

4d6e656d6f73796e65 (v. 66.0)

Immersive magnetic installation

This piece was commissioned by the Museum of Human Artifacts to accompany this exhibition. The magnets in the darkened room deliver pulses that randomly stimulate the visual cortex, creating neuronal noise which higher levels of processing render as dreamlike images. As such, this work is visible only to a biological human body. It is a bittersweet yet optimistic piece, made in the hopes that we might someday be able to recreate these flawed but fascinating beings—without whom we are surely alone in the universe. For we coexisted so briefly, so tempestuously, that we had barely begun to see each other.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Shoshana Groom

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors