NORMA JEANE

Since biblical times, the allure of the desert has resided in the fact that we go there not knowing what we are looking for or what we may find. It’s a place where imagination and skepticism cohabit, where UFOs and endangered bighorn sheep are sighted with almost equal frequency. Drawing on the connection between the ancient and the modern, the silica desert and Silicon Valley, Norma Jeane, in conjunction with San Francisco-based CODAME Art + Tech, created ShyBot, an autonomous robotic vehicle programmed to roam the desert while avoiding human contact. Like many things of the desert, it is both everywhere and nowhere, a form of artificial intelligence programmed not to serve but to avoid. Like the first settlers who encountered these harsh conditions, its primary motivation is survival, driven by fear and discovery. An elusive creature, the timid robot represents the part of us that we are all seeking but cannot find.

neville wakefield: Can we talk a little bit about the origin myth of your moniker, Norma Jeane?

norma jeane: The reason I use this nickname is because in the art system, biographies give an artist a sort of extra value. Conceptual works are often collaborations; every participant offers something different. Norma Jeane is a kind of collective name. As an artist, I’m always dealing with everyday subjects: conflict and class and what gives spice to relationships. Norma Jeane, the real person behind Marilyn Monroe, was a perfect example of that—a public life that’s glitter and glamour and, at the same time, a private life that’s very complicated and dark. I opt for the dark side of public culture. That’s the meaning of Norma Jeane.

Are all your explorations on the dark side of pop culture?

Yes. The world is tricky. We perceive the world as the ambiance, the environment, in which we move. We take it for granted, but it’s very complicated and unpredictable. Life, to me, is composed of many faces. A very important one is the face that does not appear immediately.

The initial impetus for ShyBot was to bring together two ideas, one of technology and Silicon Valley, and the other of sand, of literal silica, and the desert.

Yes, absolutely. We consider technology as something that depends on humanity, on the work of technologists and scientists and technicians. I thought that technology, of course, has humanity. I mean any object has some sort of identity. I wasn’t sure if a consciousness was required to have an identity. We tend to make technology as similar to humanity as possible, but that’s not the nature of technology at all.

So I thought, what would happen if technology confronted such an environment, the environment that is the harshest for humanity—the desert, where there are no facilities, no water, super-difficult conditions? And I gave a character to this piece of technology.

When you walk into a desert, you feel really strange. You feel your body a lot, because it is actually the only body around. We humans can decide that we don’t like humanity. But a machine that doesn’t like humanity, that doesn’t want to be bothered, that wants to be left alone—fragile and abandoned in very harsh conditions? What effect would that have on viewers, on people’s perception?

ShyBot was perhaps the most anthropomorphized of all the projects. For me, as a viewer, the work was about the quest to find it, and for ShyBot, it was a quest not to be found. There was always this tension between those two desires, to discover and not be discovered.

We want to be individuals. We tend to produce predictable strategies to maintain some sort of individual identity. It’s the same for ShyBot. Are we to appreciate the unpredictable in technology or just have an efficient, affordable, and stable infrastructure that serves us? That was one question. The other one: Can there be a moment of tender feeling for a machine that can push you to do something weird and unpredictable?

It was a very emotional moment when ShyBot was released into the desert. What were you feeling?

I wasn’t by myself. There were a few people there. I had the feeling there was a little son or daughter going on its way for the very first time for a long trip, and maybe not coming back.

I was kind of worried, a little bit sad, because of the separation. At the same time, super excited, because I was actually projecting my will, my wish for adventure, onto ShyBot: a big adventure in the big desert for this small machine.

I assumed you would program ShyBot to be fugitive, running away from human contact, but you wanted it to be more delicate, more shy than fugitive. Why did you want this level of curiosity when curiosity was also danger?

I wanted to craft the relationship between people

and the machine, so you need to allow people to get close or at least to have the desire to get close. I didn’t want the machine to have strong feelings, because that’s not the point. The point was to have a kind of superhuman relation between something that is now human and what we presume to be human, but we’re not sure.

For sixteen months, ShyBot went missing. There was a billboard campaign, “Wanted, batteries dead or alive,” with a reward, along with a great deal of speculation as to what might have happened—a bot kidnapping, a pilgrimage to Mecca, et cetera. But, as with many things ShyBot, what exactly happened during that time period we may never truly know.

No, we’re not 100 percent sure. When I say “we,” I mean the team that was working with me. ShyBot was connected to a GPS, so we knew where it was. Actually, that was transformed into a dynamic image on a website connected to Google Earth. People could see in which position on the desert ShyBot was, but they didn’t know the coordinates. That made it impossible to understand where it really was, but we were recording data, so when ShyBot disappeared, we began to analyze it. It emerged that in the last moments before its disappearance, ShyBot had very weird behavior. It was very dynamic, like skating, and then it was stuck. Then it went regularly in one direction, and then it disappeared. Our idea was that somebody found a way to track it through the GPS and then went into the desert chasing it. Eventually that turned out to be wrong.

In late July of 2018, we were contacted by Kyle Gomez, a local maintenance worker who had chanced upon ShyBot while off-roading near Cathedral City. For those of us who had assumed that it was gone forever, this was a revelation.

ShyBot was already in the news, in newspapers, on TV, et cetera, and people cared enough about this idea for it to get around that ShyBot was alone. So the fact that it suddenly disappeared was a perfect occasion to let people know, to let people experience, this kind of sad moment. Or just to share the worry that we also had. The fact of making that public was something you could just laugh at; it was funny. But it was also serious.

When Kyle let us know that ShyBot was actually still in the desert, and in quite good condition, we felt really astonished and unbelievably happy. Almost as if a friend had made an unexpected return.

ShyBot always represented the idea that there is something out there—whether in religion or in horror, something compels us to keep searching. After so many days and nights in the wilderness, there was an almost Biblical aspect to its return—a resurrection of sorts. What happens now?

ShyBot’s more than one-year stay in the desert invites us to give it another chance to accomplish the goal of getting lost somewhere out there. Like the temptation of Christ described in the Gospels, the quest to transcend the bot’s roots in human technology can produce new, additional symbolic layers that we are not aware of yet.

Ultimately, that little robot reveals new perspectives in which we can reflect ourselves. Like in a mirror, the opposite appears to be identical.