Paul’ V.4.3

For Street Views, projected on the museum’s facade every night from dusk to midnight, CAM presents Paul’ V.4.3 as part of Paul Chan: Breathers. An ongoing project begun in 2021, this work makes its public premiere at CAM.

Chan calls Paul’ a “synthetic self-portrait,” using the single apostrophe to denote the mathematical symbol for “prime,” which identifies value as derivative of something original. Programmed and trained by Chan himself over the past three years, Paul’ is designed to respond to queries about Chan, the Breathers, and “semself,” the pronoun Chan invented to refer to Paul’ and other synthetic agents. Over 1,600 questions were collected over the past three years from Chan’s friends, strangers, artists, museum staff, children, and St. Louis residents. Responses to a sampling of the questions appear dynamically on the screen, as if someone were typing the words in real time. Paul’ types at the same speed as Chan and even makes the same typing mistakes and misspellings the artist does. It is said that how a person types is as unique as their fingerprints.

Chan’s ongoing private research and development in AI stems from his interest in imagining what a 21st-century kind of portrait might look and feel like. What would Holbein or Vermeer make today? “I want sem to do more than chat. I want Paul’ to respond to questions and hold conversations like me. Just as a photographic or painted portrait may aspire to possess likeness, my ambition is to capture likeness in a durational medium like texting or a casual dialogue.”