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We Talked To The Artists Re-Enacting An Armed Robbery In A Virtual Lab

They talked about predicting high-speed car chases through speculative physics. It's like GTA meets academia.

In the wake of a Los Angeles bank robbery in September 2012, the culprits' SUV became embroiled in a highly-televised car chase. Racing through inner-city neighborhoods with the cops on their tails, the bandits began throwing money out the windows in an idealistic, ultimately futile act that earned them the name, "the Robin Hood robbers."

It was not a chance encounter. Or, so say the art duo consisting of Chris Woebken and Sascha Pohflepp.

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For their latest piece, A History of Speculation, which was recently shown at the Photographing the Future show in Hamburg, Germany, the two artists formerly known for their collaboration on The Society for Speculative Rocketry, have built a conspiracy theory around this GTA-esque moment.

An attempt to predict the future through physics, math and technology, the duo are opening a residency and group show at the Museum of Art and Design's Biennial in New York on July 1. Entitled The House in the Sky, their new work is a continuation of their fondness for LA-based madness. Simply put, the duo have refashioned a house in the Hollywood Hills into a nuclear strategist’s 1950s den, a set piece designed specifically for speculative thinking. More so, they're fascinated by how the robbers threw the cash outside the window of their speeding car—"if you knew all the parameters [the moment] and had a perfect model of the physics involved, you still couldn't predict how the money would fly." This inspired the duo to put the car into a virtual laboratory to re-enact the scene.

We caught up with the artists to chat about their conceptual look into armed robbery, as well as some musing on sci-fi cops and drones.

The Creators Project: First, why is there a Volvo SUV in your piece?

Chris Woebken & Sascha Pohflepp: It is a visual re-enactment of an event that unfolded in Los Angeles on September 12, 2012 when a bank got robbed in the Santa Clarita area north of the city. The robbers’ getaway car was a black Volvo XC90 SUV, which was subsequently chased by police vehicles and news helicopters. The footage of robbers throwing cash out the window was streamed live to both local households and to the LAPD's situation room from where they use certain technologies to coordinate the attempt to apprehend the robbers (there are hundreds in Los Angeles every year).

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The whole scene resembles a shot from a movie, but on another level it is also like seeing the universe at work. We felt that the way in which this played out is telling us something about our culture of the future. Notions of determinism versus emergence in action, playing out in something as pop-cultural as an 80-minute-long car chase.

What technologies were the police using?

One of the applications they are likely to use is called Oculus GeoTime, a forensic tool which allows for the tracing of the movements through a sort of space-time-continuum. The extreme vision of tools like that would be the human ‘precogs’ in Philip K. Dick’s ‘Minority Report,’ the prediction of crime before it happens. GeoTime still looks back in time but its visual language is interesting because it directly link to early 20th century theoretical physics, especially the work of Hermann Minkowski and his idea of the 'world-line,' a visualization of possible pasts and futures for any given thing and how they relate to each other. If two cars whose position gets permanently logged – say a cab and a police car involved in the case – meet at an intersection, one could later see that their world-lines intersected at that moment and the driver of the cab might be called as a witness.

What was the peak moment of the car chase to you?

Since the chase was live on local TV in the Los Angeles area, as the robbers got into more and more densely populated areas as they were racing south on the freeway, the audience started predicting the course of the vehicle in order to try and intercept it – hoping to get some 'free' cash. It became a frantic game which culminated when a crowd of hundreds of people formed around the vehicle after it was finally stopped in South Los Angeles, some chanting, "We want money!" Overall it felt very Grand Theft Auto in the way that the city was being used by all the actors involved.

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Do you think it was chance or destiny that they gave money away in the low-income area?

That probably depends on who you ask and where they actually were trying to escape to. One witness is being quoted as calling it a “kind of Robin Hood situation” while a Captain Mike Parker of LAPD said that “criminals on the run may throw evidence out of car windows [but] can't imagine they did this for the good of the community.”

Politically, there is of course something deeply ironic about the whole scene. We were most interested in the aspects of predicting the future and whether that is even possible, something we had a lot of discussions about with our scientific conversation partner, Dr. Janna Levin of Columbia University.

Tell me about Ilya Prigogine's book: what was the point, and how did it influence you?

Ilya Prigogine was a Russian-Belgian chemist and a Nobel laureate [who wrote] The End of Certainty. Prigogine and philosopher Isabelle Stengers state that determinism – the belief that the world is predictable – is no longer a viable scientific belief and that it is quite possible that what we call ‘the future,’ emerges as it happens. If you’re interested in the future, that is quite a bold statement, because it implies that there can be no such thing as prediction, apart from speculating in very broad strokes.

It’s a debate that has essentially been going on for a very long time, but Prigogine’s argument has a lot going for it, especially since it has implications on other fields such as biology. It was also interesting to get a sense how one’s own practice and the way in which we talk about the future are embedded in such a rich history of investigating the fabric of the universe.

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So why are you combining an L.A. car chase with spaced-out speculative physics?

The car chase is interesting once you look at the cash flying out of the car’s window— if you knew all the parameters, the location of every atom, had a perfect model of the physics involved and an infinitely fast computer— in this view of the world, you still couldn’t predict how the money would fly. We were initially fascinated by watching the event as such, but the more often we re-watched the video on YouTube, slowed it down, let it run backwards and so on, the more it occurred to us that according to Prigogine, the money would probably never scatter in the same way, even if somebody had the power to turn back time. This was the moment when we started to put the car into the virtual laboratory to re-enact that scene.

Now, how does the Voyager spacecraft in the exhibition fit into all this?

Our interest in this one goes back to coming across a list of things that are believed to happen in the unimaginably far future. One of the things predicted is that in 1065 years’ time, solid objects will have rearranged their atoms and molecules via quantum tunnelling, because on that time-scale all matter is believed to flow like a liquid. The two Voyagers have just recently left our solar system, but they will keep racing through the void for a very, very, very long time, potentially forever. We created this simulation to visualize what would happen if they actually keep traveling eternally and would, under the influence of their own gravity, slowly liquify into a round metal object.

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Why are you so obsessed with fortune-telling?

Most people who work creatively with technology are in one way or the other in the business of fortune-telling, because the promises of technology tend to lean towards the future. There are many ways to look at the future. For some it’s the notion of fate, that the future can't really be influenced beyond God's will. Later there was theoretical physics, ideas of relative time that our horizon extends into the future and the past. More recently, in the mid-20th century, there was a distinct moment where ideas of predicting or forecasting the future got the upper hand. The Cold War necessitated the creation of 'future scenarios' in order to better be able to deal with the uncertainties of two blocs that could mutually destroy each other within half an hour, at the press of a button. This also gave a big push to the then-emergent technology of the computer and its capabilities of number-crunching, which led to many of the devices that we are surrounding ourselves with today.

What conclusions have you gained from all of this?

The TV helicopters in a sense became surveillance drones which the general public was using so they could— at the right moment— run out of their houses to intercept the car. These are the very things that early computers were used for, the interception of vehicles. We can’t help but find this fascinating, especially imagining that in a future version of Los Angeles, there may be a lot of actual, maybe even personal drones in the sky, live-streaming a constant flow of images. Or a live feed from a satellite which has been constantly advancing from hoax to reality, most recently with an announcement from a San Francisco-based company called Skybox Imaging.

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So, if TV helicopters are drones, are cops aliens?

Probably not, but they might share the same perspective (from a bit farther away). The Los Angeles sky is definitely full of UFOs, most of which say LAPD.

Check out Chris Woebken and Sascha Pohflepp at the Museum of Art and Design's MAD Biennial in New York from July 1 to October 12. Check out their videos, too.

Follow @nadjasayej on Twitter.

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