The Pacific According to Rindon Johnson

The field of investigation in which the American artist and poet Rindon Johnson operates for his intervention at the Rockbund Art Museum is the Pacific Ocean. With its seabed divided among nations for mining, its surface crisscrossed by cargo ships and commercial fishing vessels, the Pacific is essential to ensuring our future. In the installation Best Synthetic Answer #1: Crossing…, Johnson simulates a real-time journey from San Francisco to Shanghai. Over the course of seven months, Johnson's avatar swims through the ocean, encountering only plastic debris and offering an immersive experience that attempts to describe the immensity and multidimensionality of the Pacific. To create the installation, the artist employed several artificial intelligence models to guess the live conditions of the Pacific Ocean. An invitation to imagine the immense Pacific not only as a geographical entity, but also as an organism made up of a series of flows and folds, waves and depths in which the artificial and the real converge.