In 1992, the mathematical biologists Martin A. Nowak and Robert M. May published a letter in the scientific journal Nature called “Evolutionary Games and Spatial Chaos.” In it, they provided a simplified model for the so-called “Prisoners’ Dilemma,” a thought experiment that was developed by the RAND Corporation during the Cold War and was used to demonstrate how individuals who choose to act in their own interest instead of cooperating with each other ultimately can make things worse for themselves. Their model assumes only two kinds of players: “those who always cooperate and those who always defect.” As they noted, their spatial model, in which “every individual ‘plays the game’ with their immediate neighbors,”

In her work of the same title, artist and programmer Sarah Friend creates a digital version of this “spatial model.” It takes the form of a dynamic grid made of colored dots that are animated in real time by code that runs in the viewer’s browser. Each dot is playing against its neighbors and can only do two things: cooperate or defect. Blue dots are cooperators; red dots are defectors; yellow dots are cooperators who converted to defectors; and green dots are defectors who converted to cooperators.

The model is set against a backdrop of moving clouds that are generated by a pixel shader, which is a program that runs on a graphics card and composes each pixel in a gridded pictorial field simultaneously, instead of calculating the position of the digital objects represented within that field. (Here, the white clouds are essentially mathematical noise—technically, Perlin noise with fractional Brownian motion applied.) In addition to pointing to the history of commercial digital animation—which has evolved to more convincingly portray natural forms like waves and human hair—the clouds recall the words used to describe modern computing as a kind of immaterial medium, from “cloud storage” to “Ethereum.” These word choices are not without irony, given that the technologies they describe depend on the mining of natural resources and consumption of electricity powered by fossil fuels. Floating in parallel—as if they exist in the same frame, but not in the same space—the digital clouds and game-theory dots remind us that we are failing to cooperate on a global scale in the battle against climate change. The question is whether the same digital technologies that have contributed to the problem might also offer a way out of this “prisoner’s dilemma,” such as through blockchain-based cooperative organizations.

With its triangulation of nature, technology, and abstraction, Friend’s work extends the conceptual commentary of Sherrie Levine’s Equivalents: After Stieglitz 1-18, 2006. To make this gridded series of eighteen black-and-white images, Levine used pixilation to further abstract the “painterly” images of clouds shot by the early twentieth-century photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who helped elevate photography into a fine art (in part by organizing the first museum exhibition of photography at the Buffalo AKG in 1910). Levine’s work raises the question of whether the technologies we use to “capture” nature (from photography to fracking) might be making nature ever-more “obscure.” By pairing her own digital clouds with a mathematical visualization of the prisoners’ dilemma, Friend further blurs the line between abstraction and figuration: are the dots representing models of human behavior more or less “abstract” than the clouds based on mathematical noise? That is—what does it mean to make “abstract” art when “reality” itself is becoming a series of zeroes and ones?

Note: This work is not optimized for viewing on mobile devices, as the grid is dynamic and responds to the configuration of your browser window; please view it on your computer’s browser. The artist’s proceeds from this work will be split with Galerie Nagel Draxler.