But, Can You Swim In It?

Artist Statement

Leandré le Roux

"But, can you swim in it?"

2024

It is a common practice, often laced with much nostalgia and childhood memory, to hold up a shell and ‘listen to the ocean’. Of course, the roaring sound is not the ocean, but rather an illusion created as sound moves around the hollow home of a now-dead creature. In the artwork “But can you swim in it?” this common, naturally occurring, simulation is pushed further by the use of AI tools. Luma AI was used to generate a ‘seashell’, resulting in a conglomerate design that aims to present the essence of a seashell without referring to any actual genus or species that exists, therefore not a seashell at all, but a sign. This design was then 3D printed; a machine’s interpretation of a natural structure, being created in observable reality by a machine. If a viewer were to pick up the shell of "But, can you swim in it?", they would hear an AI-generated sound of the ocean, generated through using the AI tool MyEdit, emanating from a speaker hidden in the solid shell shape.

"But, can you swim in it?" offers the viewer loose signs, and simulations, of something that was originally already a simulation. The home of simulations is a desert, as per Baudrillard, with signs pointing only to signs with the ‘real’, here symbolized by the ocean, nowhere in sight. The desert of the simulacrum has no beaches, the sea is only another mirage or distracted eco without an actual source. AI tools, like all human tools before it, have the possibility to expand the representative world of art and offer new avenues of creation.

However, like all of the previous applications of human tools, those who wield the most powerful, complex, expensive, and probably private, tools are not interested in benefiting those of us who listen to the ocean through seashells and pine. We remain trapped in our narrowing class system, sliding ever downwards, with no means to go to any actual place close to the seaside. So, yes, you can see a version of a seashell, yes, you can hear something like the ocean, yes, you can be reminded of the beach and the ocean, But, can you swim in it?