Of Termites and Men
Lilyillo's portraits of empty chairs beckon us to sit with the prospect of our own absence.
“The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
—Adapted from Robert Burns’ To a Mouse
When Lilyillo was a child, her father, an architect and carpenter, began building a home for their family. They were already living in the unfinished structure when a serious problem cropped up. At night, lying in bed, her father would wake up to the sound of something in the walls. Termites, it turned out, were eating away at them, devouring the home he had dreamt and sweat into being for his family. The infestation turned out to be fatal. Lily and her family had to abandon the home and her father’s hard work, razing it to the ground before moving on. The episode made its mark on her.
Looking through Plans for Future Forms, the latest collection from the Australian artist, the first thing you notice is what you don’t notice. A conspicuous absence looms: the chairs featured in the works, objects typically seen as chassis for human forms, sit empty. A silence rests over the sparse scenes of vacant chairs seated on vacant backgrounds. The predominant feeling is one of stillness. There are elements of these scenes that actively engage the viewer. The pastels grab you. The chairs’ distortions invite you to inquire. Yet it’s their emptiness that truly beckons. It’s not really the chairs, then, that are the subjects of these compositions. Rather, it’s the negative space created by their vacancy. In lieu of a subject, we have an anti-subject. But what exactly is it that’s missing?
Relevant to that question is the fact that these works were created with the help of AI. Though trained with a traditional art background and well-aware of the skepticism surrounding the technology, Lily hasn’t shied away from engaging with AI in her work. Instead, recognizing its pivotal place in our society’s present and future, she has chosen to speak on it by speaking through it.1 In Plans for Future Forms, the compositions originally depicted human subjects occupying the chairs. These humans were then erased via an inpainting process, replaced with the diffusion model’s best guess as to what lay beneath them.2 The resulting chairs bend and split into fragmented, nonsensical forms that betray the presence of their former occupants. Variants of the manglecore aesthetic, their dissociation “signifies the tool within the work,” as the artist would put it. Their vacancy is made all the more forceful when juxtaposed with her prior collection Architects in Chairs. These paintings are broadly similar—wood-grained textures, pastel hues, chairs suspended over spacious backgrounds—but distinguished in one key respect: the architects have vanished. What we’re left with in the end is a collection of empty chairs marked indelibly by the bodies they once held. Despite their emptiness of content, they overflow with symbolic meaning. Chairs are a curiously commonplace symbol in the arts and philosophy, and here Lily employs the potency of that visual language to point to realities both personal and universal.34
At the universal end, the negative space left behind by the AI-assisted erasure of the human subjects conjures a post-human world, painting for us a portrait of our own absence. Whether it be literal elimination or something more akin to a decommissioning, the era of AI ascendancy spells a massive transition for humanity. According to the doomer camp, we risk total extinction. A more mainstream perspective envisions us simply being rendered superfluous. No longer needed for production, we will float adrift, rudderless, useless, purposeless. The pieces in Plans for Future Forms echo sentiments which the aftermath of either scenario might give rise to—stillness, quietude, contemplation, mourning. The scenes call to mind shipwrecks, both in their formal properties and in their ambience. The wooden limbs stand fractured and askew, recalling splintered beams, while hollow hulls of chairs carve out the space that once held their passengers. In many of the pieces, chairs seemingly float in space, buoyed by formless backgrounds. A sense of timelessness pervades. As we peruse the collection, we walk on haunted ground. The chairs are no longer tools, but artifacts. And like a shipwreck, the absence isn’t total—it’s shaped by what’s left behind, the traces of what was once there still rippling in its wake.
It’s in these remnants that Plans for Future Forms comes together in full. The absence of the subjects is conspicuous because of the marks they leave behind. The process of erasure is not without its smudges. AI has its tells—the warped leg of a chair where a human one used to be; the lurking organic shadow seemingly cast from nowhere; fragments of humans still clinging on to the last vestiges of their existence.
Together these marks say on our behalf, “If we are to be lost to time, it will not be without a trace.” We see them in the chairs, but these remnants show in another set of objects just as crucial to the collection’s symbolic language. A subset of the pieces are defined by the presence of blueprints and drafting paper, often set as the background upon which full-fledged chairs hover or sketches thereof are drawn. Indecipherable marks, seemingly made by human hands, are scrawled scattershot across many of their canvases. A handful of them remain empty altogether but for those etchings, forming grids populated by nothing but the merest marks of some former presence. Taken together, the works in this collection illustrate a lifecycle from empty canvases to plans and drafts to finished chairs. We watch as “plans for future forms” come and go. The ebb and flow speaks to hopes once held and since lost, to the precarity of such plans, and to the legacy of what remains after they’ve all but washed away. A full lifecycle of feelings accompanies these stages, condensed in each piece into a single moment of reflection which holds all that came before it. We see loss followed by mourning, mourning followed by stillness, stillness followed by contemplation, contemplation followed by silence. The empty chairs and etched-upon draft paper evoke them all at once. The moment contains a history. It is monumental yet minuscule.
This dynamism is true not just of the timescale, but of the symbolism and its subjects too. In the monumental condition, the chairs and their emptiness represent humanity as a whole, and the tenuous position of its existence. More colloquially, Lilyillo is speaking of and to her fellow artists and craftsmen, a synecdoche for humanity, through the chairs. Artists and craftsmen work in and on chairs. Chairs are their second homes. A common belief holds that their practice—one of true care and creativity—may represent the last genuinely distinctive feature of our kind, the rest increasingly encroached upon by the capabilities of AI. What happens when these too are swallowed up? The technical process behind Future Forms engages this question. AI, with the help of humanity’s own hand, both creates and fills the void left where we once sat. Per the artist, “It is a kind of sculpting and creation through the process itself. It feels like taking away and making, all at once.” Following the trajectory of technology to “objectify”, the object (i.e. the chair) is spared for its usefulness in this process; the subject is not. We remove ourselves from the equation, yet our imprint lingers.
Artists and craftsmen are our principal mark-makers, and mark-making has long been an interest of Lily’s. It has grabbed her attention since her earliest forays into art. She has spoken elsewhere about the fixation, recalling it as a practice in which she found purpose:
“When I was a child, I used to carry a little notebook of only blank lines at all times. I would fill it with running writing, because I could see my mum writing, and filling up space, in her notebooks. And I thought, ‘She must have so much purpose, so many important things to put on that page.’ And at some point, I realized that I wanted to have purpose. I wanted to fill up pages too.”
Her quest to make her existence heard through these idle inkings seems to share the same core impetus as what is often said explicitly through graffiti, and implicitly in so much else we do: “Lilyillo was here.” The etchings in Plans for Future Forms, then, reflect on the value of this endeavor for all artists and, through them, all people. What have we said? Is it worthwhile? Will it last? There’s a pessimistic interpretation that suggests that artificial intelligence spells the death of art, of craft, of mark-making, of human legacy. Technology is accelerating. This time is different, final, they say. The AI is the artist now, and “artist” is shorthand for a whole lot more. There’s conversely an optimistic take that casts the human as endlessly adaptive and imagines AI as just another tool, one which our creatives will put to new and fascinating use. These paintings, though in collaboration with AI, were still made by Lilyillo after all.
I’m not sure Plans for Future Forms takes either side. It seems rather to ask us to imagine both. Both of these scenarios (not an exhaustive list of possible futures, mind you) accept the inevitability of escalating societal flux. The former bears the flavor of mourning examined above, the mourning of our own absence. It laments what it takes to be our progression into a post-human world, blindly marching from the Anthropocene into what we might call the Silicocene.5 But both scenarios carry with them a mourning of a different kind as well. This is the mourning of constant loss that accompanies incessant change. The hollowing out of blue collar factory work in America’s industrial sector is illustrative of this. So too is our omnipresent milieu of nostalgia. The world is changing faster than we can, and attempts to keep up will see us losing parts of ourselves in the haste. Throughout this period we will again and again hear the refrain “I thought we had more time.” Whole swathes of people and cultures will be left behind, and artists are seeing the beginnings of this. The constant loss will present in much more quotidian ways as well. Rage, protest, grief, and despair are not unreasonable responses. It’s easy for techno-optimists (I generally count myself as one) to gloss over these feelings, telling the skeptical and the reluctant to adapt, innovate, and carry on. The works in Plans for Future Forms encourage empathy. The losses are real. They leave behind negative space. Not all is fungible. You too will feel their weight.
Looking back over this collection, I keep returning to the symbol of the empty chair. I’m struck by how much it can seem to mean. I noted earlier that it affords a range of complementary interpretations here ranging from the universal to the personal. In the universal it speaks of humanity writ large, and the prospect of its absence or superfluousness. Somewhere between the universal and the personal—a narrower yet still broadly resonant scope—the empty chair evokes art and craft, and meditates on questions of our relationship to meaningful work. But it also assumes an intimately personal dimension. It is where the individual sits, where artists work, and what craftsmen build. Chairs shape and are shaped by these human forms, and carry with them the memory of those inhabitants after they’re gone. They hold personal histories. Lily herself is an artist. She was raised by a craftsman, who in turn comes from a long line of craftsmen. She grew up surrounded by, admiring, and emulating her father’s work. He’s getting older now. He has dementia and is in steep decline. His dream of building a home for his family and the termites’ shattering of that dream are emblematic of a career as an architect that never quite took off. Thwarted in his effort to build a home and without the means to buy one of the beautiful Modernist ones he so admired, he exercised his appreciation of craft throughout Lily’s childhood by collecting beautiful chairs instead. Now he is stuck declining in one of those chairs. The erosion of time follows that of the termites. The chairs that comprise Plans for Future Forms, then, are his chairs. The blueprints are his blueprints, the markings his markings. The absence is his absence.
Those termites are long gone from Lilyillo’s world, but the negative space they carved out still resounds. A person’s absence often tells us more about them than their presence. It’s in their absence that we really look, see what we didn’t see, hear their voice, their laughter ringing in our ears. We ask what we might have done differently, if we could have spent more time with them, cherished that time more fully, or held on for longer still. Plans for Future Forms gives us occasion to consider our own absence while we’re still here. What are we missing? What have we overlooked? What might we change? Through these works, Lily is inviting us into this world with her, with her father, with the company of artists and craftsmen, with one another. We straddle the present in which they are present, and the future in which they are past. They’re speaking to us across time. Let us listen then. Accept the invitation. Pause. Think. Have a seat.
This, I think, is where AI art and so many other artforms, especially in their nascency, are at their most potent and lucid: using the unique affordances of the medium to say what only it can say.
Diffusion models are the current best-in-class AI image generation models. They try to infer the prompted image from random visual noise. Inpainting is an editing technique using diffusion models that allows you to erase a specific era and prompt the model to reimagine what’s there.
Wittgenstein and Kosuth are two notable historical examples. Even among cryptoart contemporaries, recent projects from Aranda\Lasch, Luke Shannon, and Juan Rodriguez Garcia have utilized the symbol of the chair.
Chairs are a kind of ur-object. When we think “object,” the chair is often among the first to spring to mind. Everywhere we go, they are there. They serve as a second home. They’re personal, made for the individual, yet universal, made for all individuals. They’re diverse and chameleonic, able to assume an assortment of shapes, sizes, and colors, constituting a notorious design challenge on account of this. And they’re timeless. We’ve been sitting in chairs since the dawn of human civilization.
An epoch in which the primary forces shaping earth’s geological record are no longer human but silicon-based entities.