PST ART: Art & War Collide in Cai Guo-Qiang’s WE ARE

Art & Science Collide is not the first major art and science program in Southern California to be eclipsed by war. From 1967 to 1971, the blockbuster Art and Technology (A&T) initiative at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) devised an ill-fated experiment that coincided with the Vietnam War.⁷ LACMA had proposed a series of artist collaborations with corporate giants, pairing heavyweights like Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Richard Serra with General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, NASA, and others, culminating in the 1971 exhibition.⁸ With access to emerging technologies like cybernetics, holographs, and lasers, artists were intended to realize their visionary potential as hybrid artist-technologists and engineers of the future. But as atrocities in Vietnam came to light, the abstracted play of artists with technology was overshadowed by the devastatingly real impact of weapons of war manufactured by A&T sponsors like RAND and Lockheed.⁹ Already frustrated by the clash between artists and corporate culture, the exhibition opened with only sixteen collaborations that had successfully produced any work, much of which was critical of the project. Critics and even participating artists eviscerated A&T for embracing techno-fascism.¹⁰ Though intended as the first iteration of an ongoing project, the A&T initiative was discontinued. In Anne Collins Goodyear’s analysis, the technophobia generated by the Vietnam War triggered a major decline in technologically oriented artwork featured at U.S. institutions from the 1970s to the 1980s.¹¹

Fifty years later, these same complicities now undermine Art & Science Collide’s resurgence of critical optimism about science. The program centers the artist-scientist as a vaunted, influential actor whose fusion of the two disciplines produces novel solutions to today’s problems. If art and science empower each other to effect greater social good, Art & Science Collide seeks to enhance public understanding of this potential by dispelling the skepticism and charges of elitism increasingly levied against both.¹² As art is activated to produce tangible contributions to causes like environmental justice, science is rendered more accessible, stimulating, and intimately relevant through art. Despite this hopeful spirit of social concern, however, art’s overinflated sense of its own abilities is put into brutal perspective by the real-world applications of science and technology.To be sure, Art & Science Collide has evolved from A&T’s unabashedly technophilic approach. PST has exchanged “technology”—loaded with negativity in today’s world of hypervisible, digitally-powered atrocities—for a field inclusive of more natural, biological systems under the broad banner of “science.” Many exhibitions, for instance, address climate change, while avoiding controversial “digital-age issues.”¹³ The only AI-themed exhibition is REDCAT’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace; a handful of other exhibitions interrogate technologies like remote sensing and surveillance tools (among them Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency at the Wende Museum and Remote Sensing: Explorations Into the Art of Detection at the Center for Land Use Interpretation).Art & Science Collide is also much more progressive, accessible, and diverse than A&T. Exhibitions under the PST umbrella uncover diverse figures in the history of science, subvert institutional definitions of sex and gender, and elevate issues of social justice from global warming to disability activism. All Watched Over, for instance, envisions AI futurities that are “rooted in indigenous belief systems, and feminist, queer, and decolonial imaginaries,”¹⁴ showing how tools like algorithmic prediction models, augmented reality, and interactive AI can be used in decolonial practices of divination, sacred dreaming, and speculative research. Yet PST’s iteration of the art-meets-science experiment remains complicit in artwashing corporate and militaristic interests. While artistic visions of next-generation AI and reparative science are entertained in the Global North, animated through identity politics, they gloss over simultaneous atrocities enacted with those very technologies in the Global South. As artists project utopian futures, genocides are live-streamed in real time. As with A&T, which participating artist James Turrell described as “vastly overshadowed by the thrust of things going on independently”¹⁵ (i.e., the Vietnam War), it is impossible and unconscionable to separate the optimistic aims of Art & Science Collide from its geopolitical context, as the same technologies feeding new artistic practices enable human rights abuses worldwide.

This notion is further complicated by the fact that Art & Science Collide was funded by at least one major sponsor complicit in genocide, Bank of America, which has ongoing business relations with the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems.¹⁶ Further, many of the participating institutions are universities investing in weapons manufacturers, including USC.¹⁷ Four days after USC hosted WE ARE’s artistic deployment of drones at The Coliseum, University of California regents voted to equip campus police at the nearby University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with military-style weapons, including drones and projectile launchers, to further the repression of student-led pro-Palestinian protests.¹⁸ (UCLA was the most-granted institution, receiving $2 million from PST.)¹⁹ While artists may attempt resistance from within institutions, financial complicities undermine the forms of imaginative play and experimentation they enact, even when envisioned as survivance and resistance. From drones to AI, who gets to play with bombs? With whose blood money, and on top of whose bodies? In one world, a bird of paradise blooms; in another, a bomb falls on a refugee camp and a drone descends to pick off the survivors one by one.²⁰

Cai Guo-Qiang, Shadow: Pray for Protection (1985–86). Gunpowder, ink, candle wax, and oil on canvas, mounted on wood, 61 × 118 inches. Image courtesy of Cai Studio.

During WE ARE, Cai asserted: “If gunpowder is used in violence and terrorism but an artist uses gunpowder in the creation of art and beauty, that brings a sliver of hope to humanity.”²¹ Such self-aggrandizement reveals the emptiness of WE ARE’s espoused “we,” an inherently exclusionary project. Which “we” is served by the artwashing of AI and drone technology? Cai’s charged reference to terrorism also propagated the Islamophobic rhetoric of the West, demonizing oppressed groups while absolving state-sanctioned terrorism. The artist further shared, “Since September 11, I saw the impact of daytime explosions,” tracing his interest in daytime fireworks to the attack on the Twin Towers. Cai extracted aesthetic value without acknowledging the human costs of the tragedy—costs multiplied exponentially as the attack was used to justify the decades-long “War on Terror,” a war fought with drones. Presented just days after the anniversary of 9/11, WE ARE was not only literally deafening to experience but tone-deaf in its uncritical use of weaponized technology and rhetoric alike.

The exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: A Material Odyssey further attests to Cai’s indiscriminating aesthetic interest in all forms of explosive violence, humanmade or otherwise, through a selection of paintings created with gunpowder. In Shadow: Pray for Protection (1985–86), the artist renders victims of the Nagasaki atomic bomb in gunpowder and melted wax, accompanied, strangely, by a photorealistic self-portrait. Camorra Test (2018–19), an arrangement of faux-archaeological artifacts smattered with gunpowder, replicated the effect of the eruption in Pompeii. cAI™ also figured as a collaborator on two gunpowder paintings on glass and mirror, The Annunciation of cAI™ and Canvas on the Moon: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 38 (both 2023), by generating imagery and executing it with a mechanical arm. Presented with the barest historical context and eerily reminiscent of contemporary scenes of destruction, these works appeared flatly universal. Just as he viewed terrorism as singular explosions detached from systemic violence, in these works Cai minimizes the circumstances of each particular scene of violence, highlighting instead its aesthetic qualities and expression through experimental technologies. Nor was much curatorial commentary provided, as exhibition texts primarily discussed a study of Cai’s materials and techniques used in his gunpowder experiments, conducted by the Getty Conservation Institute and Getty Research Institute. While the exhibition had a deep technical focus on the work’s chemical and physical composition, it avoided engaging in a more profound analysis of art, science, and their shared capacity for violence.

Cai Guo-Qiang, Camorra Test (installation view) (2018–19). Gunpowder on plaster, marble, glass, ceramics, terracotta, brick, concrete, wire, and canvas, dimensions variable. USC Pacific Asia Museum, Los Angeles, 2024–25. Image courtesy of Cai Studio. Photo: Mengjia Zhao.

An incisive critique of such politically dispassionate practice may be found in Amy Goldin’s 1972 essay “Art and Technology in a Social Vacuum,” written in response to A&T. Goldin wrote, “Once subject matter and the artist’s ‘feelings’ were removed from the center of the stage, what was left? Materials are real. Methods are real. Places are real.”²² In attempting to fuse art with science, we must consider the materiality of artwork. Artists should be aware of how they confer legitimacy and sympathy upon destructive technologies via the methods and materials they utilize. After all, materials and methods are not disembodied tools for the artist to wield, but tangible formulations that emerge from specific networks of power, labor, and capital. In the case of many technologies, these materials are developed, funded, and used by corporations to further global campaigns of death. Art may sear, lacerate, move, and wound metaphorically, but science can be weaponized to enact material change on a massive scale and literally incinerate people alive.²³

Years in the making, Art & Science Collide could not have anticipated coinciding with the War on Gaza. Yet, war is never far, so long as U.S. imperialism continues to wrack the world from Palestine to Sudan. Against the permanent backdrop of global devastation flickering in and out of visibility, waves of both technophilia and technophobia surge across Southern California, ignited and dampened in turn by the appearance of major conflicts.

By the twenty-first century, A&T was “unproblematically reclaimed,” remembered as a pioneering initiative in hybridizing art and technology.²⁴ In 2014, it was resurrected as the Art + Technology Lab at LACMA, complete with morally dubious sponsors like Google, NVIDIA, and SpaceX.²⁵ Art & Science Collide originates from this same fascination with the technopolis of Southern California, from the aerospace industry to Silicon Valley and Hollywood—all industries linked to genocide, environmental destruction, and global exploitation. To honor the program’s attempts to critically engage and contest these sites of scientific power requires turning the lens on itself and examining the difference between reclamation and complicity. While individual exhibitions may form limited if still significant sites of resistance, they are integrated into a broader PST project that cannot resolve its internal contradictions around its volatile union of art and science—two institutions fixed in a global framework of corporate and imperial domination.

In the final act of WE ARE, entitled “Divine Wrath,” cAI™ relayed a Chinese parable about a thunder god, just before rings of thunderous explosions and blinding light began to lash around the audience. In the story, a group of children hide in a temple on a mountain during a storm. When the storm fails to relent, they realize that the thunder god is angry and demands a sacrifice. Yet when the bullies of the group push the most kind, selfless child out into the storm as a sacrifice, the god instead destroys the temple as punishment.²⁶ As fragments of debris fell from the sky at the end of the show, a pale imitation of the aftermath of a bombardment, this message felt more visceral than any other part of WE ARE. Perhaps WE ARE should heed its own final act, and refuse to submit a sacrifice to the altar of science and progress, lest the temple be destroyed and all within it.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 39.

Cai Guo-Qiang, WE ARE: Explosion Event for PST ART, Act II: “WE ARE” (performance view) (2024). Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, 2024. Image courtesy of Cai Studio. Photo: Kenryou Gu.