CHRIS THURMAN: Celebrate the unpredictability of art in a hi-tech world

We are a predicting species, hard-wired to identify potential patterns and to complete them in our heads by anticipating likely outcomes.

Most of the predictive strategies we developed over millennia have been woefully inaccurate. We’ve tried reading stars and tea leaves. We’ve tried listening to prophets and visiting oracles. Even when we think we’re using logic, we’re often not — as occurs in the gambler’s fallacy (seeing five spins of the roulette wheel landing on black doesn’t mean you should put all your money on red for the next one).

The scientific method, properly used, gets us close to reliable prediction. But it has its limitations, especially when it comes to human behaviour; just ask any honest pollster before a closely contested election.

While the quirky, irrational and whimsical may be frustrating for those trying to prognosticate for the sake of our collective wellbeing — designing policies to bring about socioeconomic improvements, say, or modelling responses to climate change — there are many reasons to cherish unpredictable actions and events.

We live under the spell of the algorithm. In an age of social media and constant, hi-tech surveillance, with marketers and strategists of the most cynical inclination trying to drive our behaviour as consumers and citizens, algorithms have been deified. Beating algorithms thus becomes a revolutionary act, like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods.

So, how to celebrate the unpredictable? How to pursue unpredictability?

For artist Kathy Robins, one answer lies in her choice of material. For some years now, Robins has been working with copper — an element that is intricately woven through our daily lives. No copper, no electronics, no circuit boards, no phones. Yet if this puts copper in the service of algorithms, Robins recruits it instead into an act of resistance through the strange alchemy of oxidation.

“Artmaking invites us into reverie, imagination and community,” writes Robins in the catalogue for her latest exhibition, Fragmented Realities: An Algorithmic Lens. “It frees us from the manipulation of life within the algorithm and reveals what is comforting, unsettling, and possible within our world.” She uses natural substances such as vinegar to activate the copper, “so that I have no control over the outcome and remain open to what emerges”.

The result is a series of works that show off copper’s varying textures and hues, from the pinkish-orange and brown of its unoxidised state to bright shades of aquamarine, supplemented by painted swathes of deep cobalt blue. Though the chemical process has been paused (or at least slowed) by the artist to prepare the copper sheets for exhibition, there remains the appealing prospect that they will change, slowly, over time.

The titles Robins has given to these pieces range from the sardonic invocation of words like “Blockchain” to the quiet yearning expressed in “Oblivion” — a desire to forget or to be forgotten, rather than have one’s every thought, feeling and action digitally and permanently archived.

In the “Viewmaster” series, smaller sections of copper are used to create wall-mounted boxes in which intriguing tableaux are staged. Again, these are caught somewhere between the satirical (each box repeats variations on a theme, in the same way that the images we curate for others’ social media feeds tend to conform to type) and the dreamlike (the iridescent colours and shape-shifting contents of the boxes catch the eye and spur the imagination of the viewer).

Copper’s place in a long history of unsustainable extraction and exploitation is also acknowledged. The softness of the cyanotype fabric prints in “Opaque”, “Cloud” and “Web” has the effect of placing the hard metal into relief. Our attention is gently drawn to the ecological and human impact of mining and related industries, encouraging us to adopt a planetary perspective. Circular works like “Connected” and “World View” remind us of what Earth looks like from space: a fragile, blue-brown sphere, the infinitely unlikely home of all life as we know it.

The end of this great experiment seems forever nigh. But humans have a habit of doing the unpredictable, and we may yet beat the algorithmic calculation that suggests we are heading towards extinction.

• ‘Fragmented Realities: An Algorithmic Lens’ is at the AVA’s Long Gallery, 25 Church Street, Cape Town until February 27.

This column originally appeared in Business Day.