{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/the-robots-were-never-the-problem-new-humans-new-museum-new-york/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":117475,"slug":"the-robots-were-never-the-problem-new-humans-new-museum-new-york","title":"The Robots Were Never the Problem","excerpt":"‘New Humans’ at the reopened New Museum misses a crucial distinction underpinning our technological age – that of the bodies that are encased and the ones designing the cages","content":"\n

‘New Humans’ at the reopened New Museum misses a crucial distinction underpinning our technological age – that of the bodies that are encased and the ones designing the cages

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Strips of tape on the fresh-out-the-box staircase had just begun to curl at the edges when I made my way through New Humans: Memories of the Future. Garlanding the reopening of the New Museum, the show examines technological and artistic histories from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and makes thrifty use of every last centimetre of its new 5,500 square-metre extension. There’s work here by over 150 artists, writers, engineers and scientists of the past hundred-plus years, divided across 13 sections. The usual suspects were all there – a special commission from Hito Steyerl, a fuzzy alcove courtesy of Precious Okomoyon, a tiny Ryan Gander mouse animatronic in the lobby and a Lu Yang for each of the two main elevators – as well as some not-so-usual suspects, like a film by quirky French documentarian Jean Painlevé, H.R.Geiger’s Necromon from Alien III (1992), a plaster model of Wilder Graves Penfield’s Sensory Homunculus. It’s sprawling and generous, bound to both entertain the staunchest white-wall haters and stimulate the art-lover that dragged them there.

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Centuries, especially the eerie parallels between this one and the last, mark every room like the beat of a metronome. As a result, there’s a not-unwelcome overrepresentation of visual art from Europe’s interwar period. American nostalgia for Weimar Berlin and the Roaring Twenties glosses over two key factors that defined interwar Europe. First, that the First World War was a mass-disabling event. In the ‘Prosthetic Gods’ section, Heinrich Hoerle’s 1920 illustration series follows his stunned and tender figures – their stumped limbs and shell-shocked eyes – as they vibrate in wiry black sinews across the tan woven paper. Hoerle illustrations abut Hannah Höch’s 1920s photomontages of cut-up limbs and slashed profiles, each yielding its own kind of prosthetic figurations. Their shared wall leads into the ‘Leviathans’ section, where French multimedia artist Cyprien Gaillard’s L’Ange du foyer (Vierte Fassung) (2019) transforms the monster from Max Ernst’s Fireside Angels (1937) into a flickering LED display. 

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Hannah Höch, Equilibre, 1924, collage, 31 × 20 cm. Courtesy Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart
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Cyprien Gaillard, L’Ange du foyer (Vierte Fassung), 2019, installation view. Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy New Museum
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Which brings us to the second defining factor of Europe’s interwar period: the insidious spread of industrial machinery. More than mere technological proliferation, this wave of modernisation successfully subordinated the humans of the working class to the machines of the industrialists. Such was the worker’s alienation that, as Simone Weil wrote in ‘Factory Work’, he was given admittance ‘only in his capacity as intermediary between machines and the things to be machined’. Proof of this enduring submission could be found anywhere today, but it’s made obvious by works like Simon Denny’s 2019 sculpture of Amazon’s 2016 patent for a worker’s cage, on view in the ‘Mechanical Ballet’ section alongside El Lissitzky lithographs and prints of engineering notation designed to diagram workers’ movement during production. That same section included a monitor playing Oskar Schlemmer’s Das triadische Ballett (The Triadic Ballet). Originally from 1922, this Bauhaus ballet famously encases the dancers in geometric costumes that turn their bodies into dolllike figurines. 

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Oskar Schlemmer, Das triadische Ballett, 1922 (restaged 1970), 35mm film transferred to video, colour, sound, 29 min. Courtesy Bavaria Media GmbH
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This crucial distinction – between the bodies that are encased and the ones designing the cages – is largely absented from curatorial literature. Instead, New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni’s catalogue essay indulges in New Materialism’s ‘we humans’, which flattens the whole of humanity into a monolith that can pay for the sins of a few. ‘For centuries,’ Gioni boldly claims, ‘humankind has been drawn to the fantasy of building intelligent machines, often modeled in one way or another on the beings we know best: ourselves.’ As he lists the resulting creations – Hephaestus’s Pandora, fembots, worker substitutes – he unwittingly names those who have been structurally excluded from such fantasies. We have reached, he writes, citing OpenAI’s Sam Altman, ‘a moment of fear’ with ChatGPT: ‘Is this a tool we have built, or is it a creature?’ But again, each of us knows if we do or don’t belong to that royal we.

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In fact, OpenAI’s founding charter established its goal to develop an Artificial General Intelligence that could ‘outperform humans at most economically valuable work’, even if it ran the risk of developing into ‘a competitive race’. As automation anxiety gives way to AI replacement dysfunction, it’s worth thinking about how these fears parallel Great Replacement conspiracies. Ruling classes (those who get to define the human today) hide their threats behind robots and immigrants, gleefully stoking fears of a subhuman or nonhuman encroachment onto the humanity of others. In response, the ‘human’ that fears robots or degeneration leans on a humanism that weighs life according to hierarchies of economic value – and thus fails to properly identify the real threat. All the while the ruling class, hiding behind technologies, scapegoats the immigrant. Fascism (in both twentieth- and twenty-first-century iterations) relies on technocrats who could align its version of human values with technologies that mystify and accelerate its goals. It’s easy to celebrate technologies for expanding our ideas of what it means to be human, but it’s harder to reckon with how Enlightenment humanism asserts itself through its technologies.

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Hito Steyerl, Mechanical Kurds, 2025, still. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper
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What’s ironic about Gioni’s uncritical ‘we’ is that it runs contrary to many of the works on view in New Humans. Hito Steyerl’s Mechanical Kurds (2025), for example, speaks to this uneven distribution of humanity. Its title plays on the Mechanical Turk, a fraudulent machine that passed itself off as a chess-playing automaton while hiding a human player inside. Amazon appropriated the name for its crowdsourcing platform, and Steyerl’s film follows people living in the region of former Kurdistan whose jobs as ‘micro-workers’ consists of data tagging so that AIs can properly identify objects. Steyerl is far from the only artist to know that the ‘we’ used by Gioni and Altman breaks down differently when it comes to subordination to the machine and definitions of humanity. The show’s historical breadth further proves these concerns are far from new.

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New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026, installation view. Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy New Museum
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Instead, newness recurs as a thwarted aspiration. The forward march of new ideas is strategically looped away from anything too radical, squarely landing us, perhaps predictably, in the realm of nostalgia. The museum’s top floor feels like a scene out of a World’s Fair poster: Bodys Isek Kingelez’s Afrofuturist maquette Ville fantôme (1996) fills the entrance with its miniature skyline as a pair of Anicka Yi’s squid-shaped aerobes, In Love With The World (2021), whirs overhead. In the adjacent space, the ‘Hall of Robots’ is rowdy with mechanical clatter as Pamela Rosenkranz’s serpent-oid robot Healer (Anamazon) (2021) slithers across the carpet and Carlo Rambaldi’s original robotic model for E.T. (1982) stands trapped behind glass. In their own time, many of these objects represented the apex of human ingenuity and stoked their own replacement anxieties. But as memories, they are neutralised. They were imbued with powers of productivity and intelligence they did not always have, to inspire fear and submission among us masses. Now, they sit on Pepto-Bismol-pink carpeting – delighting in their own kitsch, their retrofuturist fervor. The new humans, I hope, will look down on our technologies with the same  amusement.

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New Humans: Memories of the Future is on view now at New Museum, New York

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