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🎙️ The Creative Life — with Jim Kroft
This podcast is for creatives who’ve chosen the long road.
Each week, I take one aspect of the creative life — a breakthrough, a challenge, or a tool that’s helping me — and share what I’m learning from the inside.
I started the show because I couldn’t find what I needed: a companion for the real challenges of making art while building a life around it.
The podcast swings between the psychological traps we face and the practical tools that keep me going. It moves between mindset and method — but always comes back to how we keep showing up.
I’m Jim, your host. I’ve lived a long life in the arts — full of meteoric highs and humbling lows.
Here are a few stops from the journey:
🎸 Released 7 records — from major labels to van tours
🎥 Filmed 6 feature docs, screened at 200+ festivals
🧠 Built a creative business in Berlin since 2013
✍️ Top 1% on Substack for weekly consistency
📈 Raised nearly €100K for refugee & Ukraine war efforts
🎧 The Creative Life has hit the Apple Podcast charts
Thanks for being here,
Jim
🔗 Listen & Follow:
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Jim Kroft podcast where we unravel the links between entrepreneurship and the creative arts. Today, I'm thrilled to present Boris Eldagsen, a pioneering German artist and agitator. Boris' work has exploded into global recognition this year particularly after winning and then boldly rejecting the Sony World Photography Awards. It thrust his recent AI generated images to the forefront of discussions around the topic of AI. Now, I've known Boris for over a decade and have greatly enjoyed seeing his splendidly tall frame towering above the crowd and bopping away at several of my gigs.
Jim Kroft:Welcoming him onto the show was a moving moment in our friendship and to celebrate it, the team went full Joe Rogan on the film production. So please do pop over to my YouTube channel if you'd like to check it out. Now as an artist and a professor Boris is uniquely placed to explore the emerging role, dangers and opportunity of AI. Indeed, this year he's emerged as a figurehead for artists worldwide with the Sony controversy gaining ubiquitous coverage from the Guardian to Al Jazeera. So whether you're an artist navigating this brave new world of the AI landscape or you're in business and working out how to implement it, this episode is for you.
Jim Kroft:I'm your host Jim Kroft. If you're ready, then let's dive in. And so, mister no, I should say, here Boris Eldagsen. How are you, man?
Boris Eldagsen:I'm fine. It's good seeing you again after such a long time.
Jim Kroft:It's been so long. So when was it that we first met Boris?
Boris Eldagsen:That must be ten, twelve years ago through an online platform that tried to sell contemporary art and they had you employed to make studio visits and to show how artists work and you came to my place and you created an awesome video.
Jim Kroft:Well, know, I always remember it for three reasons. And the first one was, it was to meet you because it was the genius of hospitality. Ben Okri talks about the genius of hospitality. And I just always remember how welcome you made me feel. I was never like I'm working for you or anything like this.
Jim Kroft:And you were very quick to suggest, well, we should have a bottle of wine afterwards. And then it was to witness your process, which, of course, we'll talk about in which was a such a sort of inspiring thing to see firsthand, which we'll talk about during the podcast. And the third thing that I want to say is, do you remember this?
Boris Eldagsen:Yes. I gave it to you. I had two of them. Yeah. So what we're
Jim Kroft:looking at is the essential crazy wisdom, which is by Wes Scoop Niska. And Boris and I, after I completed the job and Boris completed the work of art that he was creating, we had a long chat and we we had a bottle of wine and Boris went into was guiding me in at a very critical time in my life. And I always remember this this being such an impactful conversation and you gave me this book and we just met.
Boris Eldagsen:And see what happened. Yeah. I I'm following your post and you became some kind of like mentor and motivator for artists. And I just like what you do. I think it's very important that we talk about those things, and I hope we talk about them more.
Boris Eldagsen:So for all of them who are not who don't know about this book, this is just like secondhand. It's from the late sixties, early seventies, and it's a combination of wisdom coming from all cultures and religious backgrounds plus artists. And that is what makes it crazy and the combination to show that there is a parallel between Dadaism and Eastern philosophy is what I just loved. Yeah.
Jim Kroft:So I just opened it at a random page and I just thought, okay, I'm just going to read whatever I read And to the reason I'm reading this is simply because it's underlined by Boris Eldagsen sometime ten years I two
Boris Eldagsen:years of my books.
Jim Kroft:It says, he comes very close to Zen when he refuses to search for truth and decides to have breakfast instead. Yes. Comment.
Boris Eldagsen:Well, it is the absurdity of life. I love koans in Zen Buddhism. You get a question like what is the sound of one hand clapping? And logically, you can't solve. And what you need to find is a different approach.
Boris Eldagsen:And one of the possible approaches to respond to a Sen Koan is not with your brain, but with a movement, with a performance. And I love the artistic wisdom in that.
Jim Kroft:Okay. And I was just checking that camera because I'm always forgetting to turn cameras on. I'm not I'm not losing hair, Boris Eldagsen. And but the funny thing is okay. So two two takeaways from that.
Jim Kroft:One is that when you talk about sort of crazy wisdom, this is actually something that I genuinely associate with Boris Eldagsen, and we'll talk about how that has manifested in your life over the course of the podcast. But, also, that was very lovely what you said about something that's very important to me, which is to try and pass on what I've learned so far over twenty years into the arts onto other artists. But what I love about the fact you gave me this book was that and the conversation we had is that you were seeking to to guide. And one of the things that's given me so much reward as a friend has been seeing how this capacity to guide and to, pull conversation and debate out of the void by challenging reality and literally confronting it in this sort of spirit of gleeful disruption is something that I think you've always been doing, but, of course, it's recently it has exploded onto the international sort of level. And we'll go into how and why that's happened a bit later, but I just want to know how are you at the moment?
Jim Kroft:Because I I just want to know before we talk about the stories, like, there can't be many people who over the last month have gone from being a well known artist to suddenly having 800,000,000 impressions on their work and being at the forefront of the most topical debate that there has been for decades about AI, and that must be an absolute exhausting and world flipping experience. So just how are you? For getting all the story and the rest of it, how are doing, Boris?
Boris Eldagsen:I'm okay. I took a break two weeks ago, went to the photography festival in Arles in the South Of France like I do every July and didn't do that much. Mhmm. And that was really recharging my batteries. But since I've been back, it it started again.
Boris Eldagsen:Like, comes from all sides. Sometimes I get, like, five inquiries daily. Mhmm. Or people send me interviews to ask if they can use certain quotes or just any kind of questions regarding workshops, regarding presentations, regarding exhibitions, regarding whatever.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And I'm very thankful that these doors have been opened through the whole event. It was like you have this tunnel vision. You just can move forward. And at the height of the media frenzy, had like five or six hours sleep per night because you are so much full of adrenaline. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:You're trying to react and, I had inquiries every ten minutes on all channels.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, emails, telephone. And then you don't want to miss an important inquiry. Mhmm. Once I got an email from New York Times at midnight asking, can we print your image?
Boris Eldagsen:Can you tell us in the next two hours? And that is something you would not like to miss. I would have never expected at New York Times printing my image. I saw this one. But what is happening is you just go there and go there and go there.
Boris Eldagsen:You fall into bed at midnight. After five hours, you are wide awake
Jim Kroft:again. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And you know that in those five hours, your email box has filled up. Wow. And, yeah, it is it was a very intense time. I was doing it for three, four weeks
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:In that pace. And what else could I have done? This is a once in a lifetime moment. It will not happen again and so when it came I said I'm ready, I go in a 100% and let's see where it's going to lead me. I still have no idea where it's going to lead me.
Boris Eldagsen:And I never had an idea which way it was going to lead me. When I started with AI, I had no clue what was going to happen a year later. Mhmm. But this is always this is what we can do as artists. We we start to do something that we love, and we hope that somebody out there is going to appreciate it.
Boris Eldagsen:And when it's truly appreciated, it doesn't matter if it's one person or a 100 or a thousand or a million. And that is the motivation to continue.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:I know twenty years ago when nobody cared for my photography, there was a woman in The United States that had problems in sleeping, that was yeah, she was traumatized and she said I am able to sleep again just looking at your images and she loved them so much. And that really touched me. That was a very positive, beautiful moment. And with the electrician, I had an Italian poet thanking me for the image saying, I don't care if it's AI or not. It consolidates me.
Boris Eldagsen:It reminds me of my mom. I live with my mom. She has Alzheimer's. I see her life in the picture, and I just wanted to thank you. So those things are much more important than New York Times artists to print your image.
Jim Kroft:It's for me something spine tingling because I think sometimes when you're younger as an artist and people say, don't quit and tough it out and keep believing and all the rest of it. And but of course, one day as an artist can feel like an eternity. It can feel like a whole universe, especially when you're going through difficult situations or you're struggling with mental demons or your career isn't moving forward. And and this is one of like, I literally I felt my my spine tingling as you were talking because I just it's to see someone who has walked the path and you're not talking about I mean, you know, you've had so many breakthroughs. I know I know enough about your career to know that it's been, you know, this gradual manifestation over the years.
Jim Kroft:But then
Boris Eldagsen:also I would question the idea of a breakthrough, but let's talk about it.
Jim Kroft:Oh, no. I would as well. And and and what I think that's that's quite right. But what what what I mean is to get to the point where the because it's not just it's not about what happened. It's about the why behind what happened.
Jim Kroft:And the why behind what happened is all of the inquiry and all of methodology and the searching and looking into the human condition and into technology and going around the world that has existed for your whole life. Yeah. And I think that's an interesting point to like go back back to the origin.
Boris Eldagsen:Okay? Yeah. I can tell you why I'm being an artist. So yes. What I became aware of throughout the years, and then we can also go back to the beginning.
Boris Eldagsen:Or do you want to have it chronologically?
Jim Kroft:No. There's something on your mind. You go into it.
Boris Eldagsen:What I found over the years is not that I'm doing art because I want to be loved or I want to be famous or I want to have an exciting life or whatsoever. It is where I get my energy from. Mhmm. Yeah? Being creative, creating things is giving me energy.
Boris Eldagsen:Mhmm. And I need that. And I have nothing else that could replace it. For some people it's climbing, doing some extreme sports or having a family or whatever. For me it's creating.
Boris Eldagsen:That is my electricity and this is where I need to plug in. And once you have realized this, there is no way of stopping and then it doesn't matter if you have feedback or not.
Jim Kroft:And you come from a small dwarf in Southwest Germany. Yes. And this was your beginning. And so do you remember the call, you know, the calling that took you out on the artistic path. What was the trigger?
Jim Kroft:How did Boris start becoming Boris?
Boris Eldagsen:Well, my family has always been outsiders. They didn't grow up in that area. They just moved there because my dad had a job. And then I was born there in the middle of the woods close to the French border and never did fit in. I didn't speak the local dialect.
Boris Eldagsen:And yeah, I found my home in books first and then in arts and I was not playing on the street And that was what interested me and I continued to read and to read and to read and later, my mom, they took me to exhibitions. Mhmm. On the weekend, they wanted to do something special and they wanted to see exhibitions. I don't think that my parents had really a background and knowledge or something, but they wanted to do that and it had a huge influence on me. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:This and TV. I was watching a lot of TV, too much. Yeah. I've never watched so much TV when I was a teenager. And it dissolved out of that.
Boris Eldagsen:And also there had been certain TV series that were important. I studied philosophy. I had two TV series that sparked my interest in philosophy. Which ones? And then a British band.
Boris Eldagsen:Signor de Rossi is looking for happiness and he never finds it. And the second was a nineteen thirties American series about Charlie Chan, the Chinese detective. And he was always quoting Chinese philosophy. Really? And later in my studies, I had like two semesters of Chinese philosophy, talking about Zen.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. It was basically coming from TV. And a third influence interest for philosophy was, frankly, goes to Hollywood. Mhmm. The British band, I loved what they were doing.
Boris Eldagsen:It was a gesamtkunstwerk. They had extended versions where they had people narrating text before. And it was a very weird text, I wanted to find out what is this text? Where does it come from? That was an Nietzsche quote.
Boris Eldagsen:And that all of those things stuck in my head. So I thought, philosophy is something I would like to know more about.
Jim Kroft:And so you set out and the but this was just the beginning. So one of the things that I find so interesting is that you set out and you studied in Germany. Yeah. But this was just the beginning because you also that your your early life took you to India and to Australia, to Prague to name but a few. And so I just wonder if you remember the nature of the call to inquiry to cross
Boris Eldagsen:cultures. Well, also have to ask to thank others. You need to have people encouraging you. Like, first thing, my parents, they took me there and they just kind of supported it. I had a teacher, an art teacher at school that supported me.
Boris Eldagsen:I had two girlfriends that said it's really great what you're doing, you should continue with this. And then later it was a third girlfriend that had the idea of going to India. And I had no clue, I just said yeah, let's do it. And also let's go to Prague. I've been to Prague before, I loved it.
Boris Eldagsen:And later I realized that it's like a puzzle. The pieces make sense in hindsight. I grew up in an area in in Germany that is full of history. There's nothing happening today, but you have a history that goes to the Celtics, to the Romans, you have medieval castles, you have baroque churches, you have leftovers and bunkers of World War one and World War two, all on top. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And that feeling of time is something that interested me. And then going and leaving Germany, having this semester in India, which was something I was more or less suggested by my partner, later was very, important for what I was doing in photography and also my approach because getting out of your comfort zone, becoming aware that the world is big, that there are many different ways of believing, working, creating. And this in combination with philosophy, I wanted to find out what is timeless. Yeah? What do we have in common across times, across cultures and that human condition is what has been in the center of my work since.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm. The one of the quotations I love from you was my approach to photography was psychological and philosophical. It was a journey inside. It was not depicting what everybody sees in front of them. And this is something that I find so interesting that the idea that there was something in you that you sensed, but whatever it was perhaps that you were trying to find and identify within you, it was continually, it seems to be calling you out.
Jim Kroft:And if I may ask, because you talked about these, I think a couple of girlfriends you said, and it seems to me that in my life when I look back, it's particularly at sort of critical points. And funnily enough, I look back at this moment when I came to you, it was a very critical point because I'd I'd actually just lost my deal with with the MI and I was a very sad period. I was trying to figure out my way to stay an artist and part of that was to learning filming and the rest of it. But I also had this sense that sort of angels exist, some larger and some bigger. Did you have some type of sense of angels?
Jim Kroft:I don't mean in the sort of the fluttering way, but just when you look back and you connect the dots, do you do you sort of see some type of meaning through the threads? Or, like, where does that inquiry into the human spirit, into the nature of time? Where does it lead you at this point of life? I know this is a big thing to try and summarize for yourself.
Boris Eldagsen:The reason why I studied philosophy and art is I was really interested in the big questions of life. Why are we here? What is this all for? And I thought, I get a question either in the arts or in philosophy. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And I didn't. But what I learned in philosophy is to ask more precisely and to go back to terminology.
Jim Kroft:Uh-huh.
Boris Eldagsen:And then in in hindsight, it's like you're looking for classes, everything is blurred and becomes more in focus, but only, I guess, if you also do a journey inside. Mhmm. You need to become aware of yourself, your motivations. And what I have been doing with students that start to find their path is make an inventory. Try to find all the artists and artworks that did inspire you.
Jim Kroft:If it's
Boris Eldagsen:music, literature, visual arts, and what you like about them. Write down all the creative practices you had. Yeah? Many write poems and stop. Some play an instrument and stop.
Boris Eldagsen:Mhmm. Others paint and continue. Yeah? And why did you start something? Why did you stop something?
Boris Eldagsen:And then you have this big, big map, like things like this, your post its, you put it on the table, and then you realize, hey, there are connections. Yeah? Yeah. And these connections have driven you unconsciously and at some point in your development, you need to become aware of the connections and turn them consciously into a subject to work on. And
Jim Kroft:so you're formulating your patterns out of these different aspects and insights and experiences and things that you're trying. One of the things that I find interesting is that you say to people, what did you stop at? Which I find very interesting because in the arts, I mean, even people that know they want to do this, they stop because it is just so damn hard. And one of the things that I find very moving about your inquiry, your life path is that it doesn't seem to me that there was any stopping. However, if I was to ask you about, okay, I know enough about human nature and especially about artists to know that we damn well struggle, and then when we struggle, it can be a limitless a limitless hole or or abyss or and I just wonder, like
Boris Eldagsen:It is fear, basically. It's it's fear that is holding people back. I was brought up with lots of fear inherited, my mom as being born during the war or my father as having fought as a soldier in the war. That's unconsciously. And I became aware of the fear that had been passed on to me when I was 35.
Boris Eldagsen:Before I was just like directing, I I was a very shy student and I realized then teaching later is what I can do as a professor, is take away the fear from students, the fear of not knowing enough, of not having the right gear, of having stupid ideas, of not being able to master the technology, whatever. Mhmm. So you take away this fear and then you have an open space for experimentation and the rest is going to happen constantly. And if I look back into my life, it has been a constant attempt to become aware of the fear that was passed on to me by my parents and ancestors and fight against them. And we can later talk about the Sony World Photography Awards.
Boris Eldagsen:It also happened there. There was a moment when I was torn between two options.
Jim Kroft:I remember this. This is this for me. This is the climax of
Boris Eldagsen:where I
Jim Kroft:want to get to
Boris Eldagsen:because Okay. Okay.
Jim Kroft:On it, but it's so exciting because I think we're just in, like, such synergy here. And I love that advice, Boris, about experimentation as being a pathway to a deeper self knowledge and a deeper reconnection out of a spiritual rut. I think that's just such a beautiful guidance for people. Because the thing is, I think when you're in some of those darker or more difficult times, like the first thing so often people do is they stop doing that which they love doing Yeah. Because it's not giving them the reward back.
Jim Kroft:But the thing that you mentioned earlier is that you you drew that energy. You knew that your energy was coming from the inquiry itself. But the thing is what you're saying is like, keep experimenting. And experimentation itself will lead you and will become a guide in itself. And I find that very beautiful idea.
Jim Kroft:So in terms of that 35 year old Boris, you said it was a realization or a revelation that you that you were carrying around a backpack or rather right deep inside this this this inherited fear. So a, what triggered it to to the realization? And b, how did you start confronting it or looking into it?
Boris Eldagsen:I had a time between 2003 and and '9 when I was living between Australia and Germany. I had like eight to twelve months in the place because I fell in love with an Australian artist and then moved between places. And usually, I earned my money in Germany as a freelancer and then spent it in the year in Australia. And then there was the financial crisis two thousand seven, eight.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:It was impossible. So for the first time I went to Australia with no money. Wow. So I was kind of forced to find a job there and I asked around. And then suddenly I was invited to meet the dean of the Center for Ideas at the Victorian College of the Arts, which is like one of the art academies in Australia.
Boris Eldagsen:Uh-huh. And I started to be a lecturer there. And they just loved it and I loved it. And then I asked the photography studies college that were teaching photography, and they had problems. It was just luck.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. They had an old teacher who was going to be retired and students who are 18. Mhmm. It didn't fit, so they asked me to do something. And the beauty about Australia compared to Germany is that it really give you a chance to show what you can.
Boris Eldagsen:Mhmm. When it works well, you get more and more offers. So that year when I was in Australia, for the first time I returned to Germany with money. And that was just you have you have some situations where you think, okay, now I need to try something new. There's no plan b or I need to try something new, if I'm not trying something new, it will stay as it is.
Jim Kroft:It's I thought it's just how this aspect in you I find so fascinating because on the one hand, you're like an archetypal disruptor and challenger of convention. And yet on the other hand, you are also very deeply in the dialogue with the arts. There's you know, you're not one of these sort of, like, proto punks who is just out to destroy things like the Joker and Batman. You're all for communication. And so that's such a lovely insight into your story that this part of you that was beginning to start communicating about the ideas and to pass it on was also coming out of a moment of great desperation.
Boris Eldagsen:Yes, also and also I'm having, how would you call it, I'm not taking bullshit anymore. I realized I'm too old. Life is fleeting. I'm 53 now. By 30 I would have said, oh, Sony, I don't care.
Boris Eldagsen:But now I get at the point where things really are wrong and I see it and it's connected with me, I just speak out openly. And I think that comes with age. Also, if you have experienced a lot of drama, which I did in the years of friends dying, committing suicide, assisted suicide, terminally ill, illness, at some point you realize it is we don't have that much time just to to be quiet about things that are wrong. Mhmm. And that comes also with age.
Boris Eldagsen:Mhmm. I think I'm going to be a very outspoken old guy like from The Muppet Show talking from the balcony.
Jim Kroft:But but but I think your leadership, I think, comes from different different experiences and in different ways in different people's lives. And I feel that someone who is willing to make themselves available to debate even in the sort of even in the fires like you have of Reason is like, it feels to me that this came out of this very long life path that it was Yeah. Because it feels built brick by brick and atom by atom. But before getting to that thing, which is obviously already coming out of you at this point when you're 35 and you're bit desperate and you're looking for the money and the rest of it. I don't feel like we got to the bottom of what the fear was and how you started looking into the fear because it you took on the professorship or or or talking, guiding students and being being a lecturer.
Jim Kroft:But how did you deal with the internal experience? Like, what was the rupture? Like, what was the feeling that happened when you recognize that you were carrying around this fear? I'm challenging you because I feel like No.
Boris Eldagsen:I was I was at first, I was kind of like also angry, yeah, because I said this is not my shit, it's not my baggage. Mhmm. It's the baggage of my parents. Mhmm. And it was their homework, and they had not been able to solve it.
Boris Eldagsen:But later I realized why. It's on one hand it's the time they had been born, it's the other hand that quite lately, five, six years ago, I realized they had ADHD.
Jim Kroft:But they did or you did?
Boris Eldagsen:Both my parents, therefore I have. It's passed on genetically. I would have never put myself into that basket. I've learned it through my partner who is a neuropsychologist and since I see it in eighty percent of my artist friends, we can talk about ADHD and the arts, it's a match. If it works well, it's a perfect match.
Boris Eldagsen:If it works badly, it can really drag you down.
Jim Kroft:Well, you've described how your hyper focus you see as a sort of superpower or an extension of the ADHD. Could you tell us about that?
Boris Eldagsen:I can, but I don't know how much the audience knows about ADHD. It's attention deficit disorder. That means you are not able, like others, to filter what is happening around you. That means some are very uncomfortable in rooms with a lot of noise. I can't concentrate on you if everybody's talking in the pub or if I'm not really interested totally focus what is happening here, I'm looking everywhere, I see different things and, but if I really love what I'm doing, I can get into a hyper focus and that is stronger than an ordinary non ADHD person has and then I can be really And this is why many people with ADHD are the best as freelancers to do what they love.
Boris Eldagsen:And I have built my life to live like this unconsciously and I later found out what I have done already is a kind of best practice. And it is important to become aware of when you are distracted and it's important to become aware that the hyper focus can be negative. And then you are in a circle and it's very hard to get out.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm. Mhmm. So what happens when you are in that circle? What's the nature of that type of hyperfocus spiral?
Boris Eldagsen:Well, many people with ADHD really love justice.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And if they are treated unjust, yeah, it's very hard to get the thoughts out of your mind. You get that anger out of your mind you have of a certain person.
Jim Kroft:Like an obsession obsession on the one thing?
Boris Eldagsen:It is like this. I once was was asked to create an exhibition in Portugal. I did under hard circumstance. I did a good job and they owed me money for months. Yeah?
Boris Eldagsen:Mhmm. And they didn't pay me. They didn't respond to my letters, they didn't respond to anything. I was just left behind. I've I've done my work and that's it.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. I was getting obsessed about that. I was trying in my head what I could do to that person.
Jim Kroft:Well, maybe I shouldn't ask you what you were doing exactly, Boris Eldagsen. Because knowing how creative you are, that might have been a rather creative situation for that person.
Boris Eldagsen:I had many many creative, psychologically bad ideas. In the end, I just hired a lawyer.
Jim Kroft:Well, that's better than hiring an assassin, Boris. Got the money back. Yeah. But, you know, every every freelancer out there knows this situation, and we all know how mad it can make you because people can act very sort of, yeah, disrespectfully at times towards freelancers and it can make you mad. Did you ever suffer from an intrusive thoughts?
Jim Kroft:Like that feeling of this thought is coming into my mind and it feels like not part of me. I don't know why the hell I'm feeling this. Like, did you ever feel like a sense of alienness? Because people some people talk about this nowadays, like, I'm having this coming into my mind, and it doesn't feel as of me. It feels as of elsewhere.
Jim Kroft:And it's particularly when people don't feel like a sense of an integrated self. Out of the fragmentation comes
Boris Eldagsen:Never. But I think as humans, we can do all things positive and negative, good and bad. And I have it in me, you have it in me. And if you later talk about the disinformation aspect of AI, I know so many good ways to inform and to destabilize democracies. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:It has come up. It's a creative exercise, but I'm
Jim Kroft:not going to use it. Boris, you make such a beautiful dictator. I mean, would just love to see what
Boris Eldagsen:that is. I'm not interested in it.
Jim Kroft:Did you ever hear about the pay the paper maximizer theory? Not yet. Tell me. Well, so I was just when I was, like, looking in into AI. And it's like this this this paper clip maximizer scenario.
Jim Kroft:And it's like, right, if you got AI and you plug into AI, your job and your goal is you have to make as many paper clips as is possible, and that is the absolute end that you have. Mhmm. And then the AI becomes so obsessed with carrying out this order that it essentially sees anything that comes in front of it as an impediment and therefore cannon fodder, but not only that, as, oh, Boris Eldagsen's here. He's got some rather nice atoms. I might use those to create some paper clips.
Jim Kroft:And so everything in the universe is just only served to serve the programming of the AI, which is that you are going to create as many Okay. And so then I was actually, like, putting it into Dali because I was quite interested to see what a picture of a universe that was just full of paper clips, and it was pretty wild. And but it's it it it's so interesting how all of these wild scenarios start coming out philosophically from the AI debate. And it's you know, when you think you were talking about sort of I think in one of your interviews about AI having the potential to it's I think you described it as a dictator or an autocrat's wet dream.
Boris Eldagsen:Yes.
Jim Kroft:Which I find very funny.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Kroft:And it's like when you combine that the diabolical things that human beings can do with the potential of AI. I mean, is mind blowing. And the thing is is that I think to follow those ideas to the limits of your mind is also a healthy scenario because if not, how can you understand the power Yeah. That we are wielding and that might wield itself. And so if you were to think of the, let's say, the worst of where AI could go.
Jim Kroft:Like, when you when you play through those scenarios in your mind, just give us a color, give us a sense as a as a game, as a philosophical game, what's the worst? Like, how would you or could
Boris Eldagsen:you see Which AI are we talking about?
Jim Kroft:I don't know, Boris. Know.
Boris Eldagsen:Anything that we digitalized in the nineties can be now generated and used for whatever purpose. What I often say, it's we always invented tools as humans and they are like knives. You can use it for cooking or for killing. Mhmm. But now we might have a knife that has legs and can jump off the table and do whatever it wants or not.
Boris Eldagsen:We are still talking about mathematics, about probability. If you talk to programmers, I had a chat with the head of the developer team of stable diffusion, he says it's not going to happen. What we are having here, what we create is a machine that perfectly does what you tell the machine to do. It has no consciousness, it has no will of its own. Others say we have the basis for it to become independent, to use the Internet, to connect with other AIs, to come up with their own ideas of what they would like to do, and then we have the matrix.
Boris Eldagsen:It's a mathematical probability. I have no idea if that is more probable than other things.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And I have not the power to change it. Mhmm. Mhmm. I have not the power to change that I'm going to die, that you are going to die, that the sun is going down at 09:30.
Jim Kroft:Well, look, I we're going to go into this deeper as it goes on, and that was a little flurry of of interest out of the imagining of, you know, dictators and autocracy and where the mind can go when when you let it.
Boris Eldagsen:No. Let's let's go back to talking about psychology.
Jim Kroft:But that's what I wanted that's what I wanted to do because because then
Boris Eldagsen:then then we come up at
Jim Kroft:Jung's shadow. That that yeah. Right. Okay. Okay.
Jim Kroft:Well, you follow on.
Boris Eldagsen:Well, Jung is old school philosophy. I still like him because his idea was that we have a shadow. These are the parts in ourselves that we dislike. Mhmm. Yep.
Boris Eldagsen:All the tendencies to be mean, to be a dictator, to do this information. And what we need to do in our lifetime is to come to terms. Yeah? Not to say, no, it's not me, it's not part of me. Because if you do so Yep.
Boris Eldagsen:You see it in others. Yeah. And then if you see your own shadow in others, you really get upset. It is important to integrate that part into yourself and to say, okay, this is all me and only then you can also use parts of it in a positive way and it's not going to have a life in itself.
Jim Kroft:Did you, when you started confronting the fear that you had inherited and the, let's say, shadows that you found inside yourself. Because this is the fascinating thing about the shadow is that, okay, we have an archetypal shadow that relates to a deeper consciousness or will, however you want to look at it. This place perhaps that's beyond good and evil, that is the source of whatever the hell, wherever the hell it is we come from. And yet also this sort of this potential, this well that we have within us, it can it's also conditioned by life and it's conditioned by, you know, your parents went through the second world war and it's it's you obviously had this sense of anger that came up with you, was part of the moving on of society as a microcosm through you. And then, of course, your parents, it's like they are born into an impossible moment of history that's way beyond them.
Jim Kroft:And I find this this and this thing that you said about, well, it wasn't my responsibility to carry it on. It was my responsibility to challenge it. And is that something that at that time in your life, in your thirties, do you feel that your revelation of understanding the nature of that fear and the confrontation that you had with it, do you feel that that's something that has helped you to sort of move things forward generationally in you?
Boris Eldagsen:Definitely. I think it never stops. There are still things you need to solve. My new art project talks about this, it's called trauma porn. It's the effects of traumatizing events in my family history, World War Two, and what it means to the next generations.
Boris Eldagsen:And if you talk about post war, Germany, Europe, wherever, everybody was traumatized and there were not enough help for traumatized people, so we just didn't talk about it. And sometimes it just popped up. I remember my father in the eighties when there were demonstrations on the street of the late hippies and early movement of the queens, his solution to the problem was to use Flammenwerfer. You know, the World War two, you had those weapons that were flowing flames. Yeah.
Boris Eldagsen:And he said once you have smelled burnt human flesh, it's going to cure you. And you're sitting there as a young boy and you don't know what happens because that generation, it's something they all knew, nobody talked about, sometimes it pops up, and I was too young to react to it.
Jim Kroft:I mean, you I mean, this is you are talking about the extremities. They understood the extremities of what we can do to each other and it's so interesting in our generation because having not at least many of us having we haven't experienced the brutality of of war of that nature. Do not get me wrong for a moment. There are terrible things going on. There are wars that's going on in in in Ukraine and and and and other places.
Jim Kroft:There's always suffering in the same, but the on that world level, so many people had that that closeness to how you very vividly described it, that sort of burned flesh, but done from one person to another one. And how do you feel like at this point that because it feels like we are we are dislocated somehow to that that profound darkness that exists within us. That doesn't have to be darkness, but it's like you said, what the good in you, Jim, is is there, but also the potential
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah.
Jim Kroft:To enact that darkness. And it's like that arrogance that I feel like sometimes we have nowadays. Oh, I I I wouldn't do that. Well, how the hell do you know you wouldn't do that? Like William James, when he was in he was in a in a a psychiatric ward, more like probably in, you know, what they would call the loony bin back then terribly.
Jim Kroft:And he saw this frothing man, and he was in a cage, you know, or behind bars at least. And he was there watching this man froth and rage, and he felt this profound panic in him. And he didn't understand that he was essentially, I think he was having an anxiety attack. And he said, he had the revelation, that shape am I potentially, That shape am I potentially. And what I understand from that, it's that knowledge that I feel like I know in my life that you can go over the edge into the dark in ways.
Jim Kroft:And for me, like, I worked my mental health my whole life, not just because I feel like that's like how I want to be in the world, but it's out of that knowledge that that darkness exists in each and every one of us. Yeah. And but but if you haven't gone to that place, which I would rather most people don't go to, by the way, but it's like if if you don't know that place or either in yourself on a psychological level or in such as your your parents' generation where it's been there and if they've smelt the the decay and the disaster. If you don't know that, it's just an abstract idea. And do you feel like where do you feel we are in society with that?
Jim Kroft:Do you feel like there's a disconnect to that greater darkness or potential or just a comment on that. I think what is important is to get out of your own country, to go somewhere else Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And to see that we in Europe, we are living in paradise, and that there are countries with no existing health system where people are starving. And I think that was very important for me in the nineties to go to India. And in the nineties India was much much rougher than it was today. You had people with leoproses and no legs on a kind of like wooden board with roads below just going like this and trying to get some begging in the traffic. That is something where you are thankful first, yeah, that somehow you have been born here, not with these problems, yeah.
Boris Eldagsen:What I found fascinating on a psychological level, like me living in Germany, the images I did were always like working on the shadow on those aspects. And then when I went to India, it was like those things that I'm working on psychologically are bare on the street. And what the Indians that I studied with at art school were interested in painting was the opposite, was beautiful things. They didn't, they had no interest in artwork and paintings. They wanted to have a contrast to the suffering of daily life and to have beauty, where for me as an artist, beauty was always coming second.
Jim Kroft:So do you feel now this
Boris Eldagsen:Sorry. Change the battery.
Jim Kroft:Change the battery. No problem at all.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. Tired of wake. Yeah. Jump in. Jump in.
Jim Kroft:So as you sought to integrate these aspects of your path of your past and the generations before you, what did you find that you started achieving or discovering a greater sense of unity in yourself? Like, how did that manifest in you on a psychological level? Because you're wrestling with part of, I don't like the word condition, but understanding that you were suffering from ADHD or something.
Boris Eldagsen:I had no feeling of suffering. None. I would have never put me in that basket. I felt that my parents were different. When you grow up, you think everybody is like my parents, and then later you realize, no, they are not.
Boris Eldagsen:And then I stumbled over an article telling about ADHD with grown ups, and I saw my parents. I kind of changed my attitude towards my mom. My father had passed 2,000, that was too early. But I kind of like not I did feel sorry, yeah, because it's too late for her now to change anything. We have been talking about this and sometimes she said, I don't have it.
Boris Eldagsen:I'm normal. And the next moment she says, yeah, what you are telling about it, it fits to me as well. Mhmm. But for me, when I got aware of it, it was in my late forties and I thought, fuck, I have wasted so many years without even knowing why my parents are different and not realizing that it is affecting me and not realizing that it has affected all my relationships. If I go back to my relationships, most of them had ADHD as well because as a non ADHD person, you just cannot live with an ADHD person for a longer time.
Boris Eldagsen:And all of my artist friends, and I started talking openly to my artist friends and many of them said, Thank you. I started to think about it. I realized I'm part of it as well. And that knowledge also improved their lives.
Jim Kroft:Do you think the thing that made you struggle in relationships was in terms of the manifestation of ADHD or what what what I I don't I don't really like the limiting terminology of the experience you were having. Let's put it like this. But was was there an obsession with your work? Like, what was it the that challenged the relationships, specifically from your condition of what was going on inside you?
Boris Eldagsen:One thing is was fear. Mhmm. Yeah. Fear of communicating openly, that took some time, yeah, to talk about problems, to talk about sexuality, and fear of not knowing how to pay the rent. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:That fear was inherited from my parents. Mhmm. There was always a problem with money, and there was never enough money to pay stuff. That was having an effect on my relationships and then often different life goals. The woman I went to India and to Prague, was studying medicine, she had a clear career and she wanted to have a family.
Boris Eldagsen:And I had no idea what to do, I just finished my studies with philosophy and art, what do you do To maintain a living, I didn't want to go become a teacher and I needed to have a job to be an artist and how can I then start a family? And it was overwhelming for me, so we split up and she started a family with another doctor.
Jim Kroft:How did that affect you?
Boris Eldagsen:I think it was good for us to separate and I'm still loosely in contact. And she had two two sons and when the youngest was a teenager, he was sent to me because he needed to do an artistic project in school and he wanted to do photography, so they asked me, can he do something with you and can you be the expert to talk to him? And I did.
Jim Kroft:That's lovely. I don't think it's an unfamiliar story and I certainly relate. The reason that I didn't want to have kids young was because it was always very tough in the arts in terms of like what whatever was going to how were you going to make a living and be an independent entity in the world beyond the, you know, the next day. And I think a lot of people struggle with that nowadays. And I think a lot of people maybe who might have wanted to have kids like don't have kids as a result of that.
Jim Kroft:It's I think maybe that's something that isn't talked about enough in the arts because it is, of course, people do have breakthroughs and make wonderful careers, but a lot of people who are great artists are always living at the threshold of survival.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. Two two things I would like to tell about kids, like Mhmm. My older brother also had no urge to create a family. I think what we realized as children growing up in a household where there was no money, yeah, I don't know that we had the idea that having kids is making your life better. It was making it more complicated.
Boris Eldagsen:And then I thought it was even so complicated like for parents that are no artists. Yeah? Being an artist is going to be more complicated. But I have an an an a very good artist friend and she has three kids.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And she studied art and when she got the second kid, her professor basically said it's over now. Like, how can you have an art career now? Because two kids. And with the third kid, do something else. Responsibility, buddy.
Boris Eldagsen:She continued and she still continues, and she has great kids, and the oldest is also an artist, yeah, and it somehow worked. And her work, lifetime work was about feminism to prove her professor that she was wrong with her assumption that you either have to decide to be an artist or to have a family. Yeah. It is for sure tougher.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm. Mhmm. And so if someone is before we talk about the Sony World Picture Awards, terms of an artist out there who is at a point in their life or their career and just in that moment of struggle that you you've mentioned different times of different struggles that you've been through in your thirties when you had the realization of the fear and something you had to work out. And then also later in your forties when you had you said and it was very moving. You were like when you realized that your parents had suffered from have not suffered, so when your parents had with ADHD had lived with through the experience and that you had as well.
Jim Kroft:And you had this feeling of, oh, I wish I'd known earlier, which really touched me because it's look, we all have our past and the past is such a strange experience because on the one hand, we can't change lineage that we've been through. And yet on the other hand, we can change everything. And so it's a paradox because it's a sort of like unity of disunity if you like and It's work. And it's work. To that artist who is in that moment where they really they're just struggling about how to go forward.
Jim Kroft:They know that it's something that they want to do like you do. They they they've got to that point where it's it's not really a question, but nonetheless, it's like the how am I going to do it? Yeah. But what what what would you say to that person, that younger version of you, let's say?
Boris Eldagsen:It is very important to identify what gives you energy. This you need to maintain. Without energy, you can't keep on. And if in the process there are aspects that drain energy, try to change it. Get rid of them or have it less draining and be aware of your health and do something that keeps you in balance.
Boris Eldagsen:I never had time to go to proper sports to care for my health. I'm six point two tall, everything is not big enough. And when I was 30, having, I started to have back problems in my twenties, and then a 30 guy said, you need to do something or you will have disc prolapse. And I said, yeah, yeah, I'll do it later. I had two very hard disc prolapses.
Boris Eldagsen:Did you? With the second one, I couldn't sit or stand or walk for months. I need to do a rehab. And what I would ask, I said, just be aware of that your health is going to change, that you have a certain amount of energy, and that needs to be refilled. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:So it's very important to to find that source that can refill your batteries.
Jim Kroft:In terms of how one puts that into action in the day, do you have a day routine or a daily ritual or a morning routine? The reason I ask is because a lot of artists struggle with the fact that or at least especially when you're younger, and I've I've I've been obsessive, I think, about how to be in the day, the process of being in the day. How do I keep because as an artist, you spend a lot of time alone. That's just how it is. And I mean, yesterday, wonderful.
Jim Kroft:I had a day. I had a fourteen hour day on set filming and that was lovely. But there are a lot of days where I'm literally just with myself and that's the experience of being being an artist. And so I've ritualized all types of different things as ways of not only sort of being productive, but much more importantly, like you said, about managing my energy, keeping healthy, finding this balance that you talk about. So what do you have certain rituals or routines?
Boris Eldagsen:Not in the past years, because I'm living with my partner now, and that is still in the flux, and she got sick last year, changed everything, so there is no normal daily life for months now. I'm going day by day, but I really think what you are doing is how it should be. And when I was living alone, I had things like this. I'm a late night person, I photographed for years only at night, And then I also got up late, I had breakfast when there was a place at Rosenthalerplatz where I could still go to. I just went there and had a little breakfast.
Boris Eldagsen:And then I started and I did jobs and administration and so on and washing and all the stuff you need to do. And then in the evening, in in summer and in autumn, I went out shooting for two, three hours. Mhmm. And then I had a late night beer on my way back Yes. And started again the next day.
Jim Kroft:How has it been, if it's okay just to ask, how has it been recently because I know you've been through so much and I don't want to pry into your private life. Yeah, no, you can talk about it. But I just mean that I've also been through cancer in my family. So I have a sense of how hard and painful it is with a parent, not with a partner. And how do you manage such a difficult situation,
Boris Eldagsen:such
Jim Kroft:a painful situation when there's I'm asking from two perspectives, one on a life perspective that that's just a very hard experience. And maybe perhaps even more so as an artist because maybe when you have the ritual of having to go to the nine to five, that's quite a useful time to have to do basic things to keep you going even if one's resistant and a bit exhausted, but the ritual maybe helps you. But the other thing, you've your life has been through an explosion recently. I mean, not many people have had the experience of life that you've had recently. So how do you how have you managed
Boris Eldagsen:I all of these think there are many experiences that keep me grounded. And it's the the normal dramas of life. I had a friend that tried to kill himself when he was 27. He was jumping out his apartment in Meucal, was found hours later, and then he stayed in a kind of wake coma for months. And I visited him once or twice a week.
Boris Eldagsen:Then I had a couple of years that were good and then five, six years ago I split up with a long term relationship very painfully, then I was financially bankrupt, Then a friend of mine turned crazy and later we found out he had a brain tumor. And then another friend turned crazy and killed himself in the third attempt of suicide. Then you had corona, my mom had terrible corona in the first wave. After the first wave, the friend with brain cancer said, Listen, I have possibly a year, one and a half, and then I'm going to die because I'm just going to be paralyzed or I can't breathe anymore and the only freedom I have is to decide when do I want to die. And he asked me to organize that in Switzerland.
Boris Eldagsen:And I said, I can't do it alone. Mhmm. So we had a team of three, an old school friend of him organizing the payment, another artist friend and me just accompanying him to Switzerland, being there when he died, cleaning up his apartment. And then my new partner finally moved to Berlin. Six weeks later she got a cancer diagnosis.
Boris Eldagsen:I'm sorry. And that was just a series where you think it's going to be better and then it hits you again. And the cancer therapy is nearly finished, everything is as good as possible. But you have to keep in mind her diagnosis is one of the reasons why I got into AI. That was one of the only ways of being creative that were possible last autumn.
Boris Eldagsen:But after those things, you realise it can be over tomorrow, it can be just a mistake, bad accident, and then you think, is this it? Yeah? My friend who was three years older than I, he's dead now. Yeah? Is this it?
Boris Eldagsen:My friend who tried to kill himself when he was 27, he's twenty years dead now. And but to go through the pain, the only thing you can do is to acknowledge it. You can say, yes, it hurts. And I think the best consolidation you could get by a friend is just saying, it hurts. Yeah.
Boris Eldagsen:There's nothing I can't talk you out of it. Mhmm. I can just be there for you when you need one. And those are moments you will never forget.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. I know there is a friend of mine, an actress, when twenty years ago, my father was dying and the other friend was in in in coma and I was going from one hospital to the next. She said, who is taking care of you? And I thought, question no one asks. Yeah?
Boris Eldagsen:I said, no one. Then she said, well, you come to me. She was playing theater in Turing that time and you come for the weekend and you get a hot bathtub, which I hadn't in my apartment and we're going to watch the Oscars and I'm going to cook for you and that's something you never forget. I think those things are important and then getting through it. The pain will become less, the pain will become bearable and then suddenly things are happening you cannot predict.
Boris Eldagsen:Like the whole AI thing, yeah, came out of the blue and that a year later I'm going to be live on CNN, who would have thought? Yeah. So but if you have experienced those those elements, this is the grounding you need. Yeah. I know all of that hype or interest in me can be over next year, next month, and so be it.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah? It's not like I have made it now. This is going to stay. I have no idea what's going to happen. Maybe the interest in me and my work will become more or maybe I'm back to where I started.
Boris Eldagsen:And this is what you know as an artist. You have a project, you have an exhibition, you think this is it. This is going to be my breakthrough. This exhibition, and I'll do everything for it, and then I'm going to be discovered and life will be different, and you do it, and it's not happening. And then you start again, and then you are back to Sisyphus.
Boris Eldagsen:And this is it, you can only do as much as you can, give it all, and if it's going to happen to lead you somewhere or not, it's not really in your hands.
Jim Kroft:And maybe not even relevant at the end. Mean, when I when I listen to you Boris, I feel so moved by everything that you told me about. It's such deep, shared human experience. Some people know more of it at a certain time in their life. Some people know less of it.
Jim Kroft:When I was just listening to you now and I was just it was almost like I I deepened in my sea because it was I'm looking forward to talking with you about the other stuff but it also suddenly felt so irrelevant because this question of mortality not as something to be feared necessarily because it's also like you said, it's okay. Whatever feeling is there, it is okay to feel. But I just felt this, I was, I just had this overwhelming sense of that's the meaning. Just that, nothing else. Not an end, not a search for an answer.
Jim Kroft:Mean, it's so easy if you're on a podcast, people are looking for answers. We're all looking for answers and it's like, I don't know, when you just told me that tapestry, it's like, I could breathe. I was like, okay, it's okay. It's just its own bubbling anarchy and all I could hope in such situation that I was in with you is to speak so eloquently and emotionally and really, you've got glittering eyes but you're not getting, you don't feel like you're suffocated by that that you're and being it just, I mean, it feels like, I don't know, I feel like just sitting opposite you in a state of learning somehow. I'm very thankful for that and I, it's so strange because I was like, how the hell does this man evoke such a sense of peace with such disruption going on in his life, such inquisition, positive, negative, all of the in between.
Jim Kroft:You don't have to color it as anything. But also with such a profound experience of mortality and the tragedy of life and the beauty because friendship is also Yeah. Even if you lose a friend, you've also got the friend that you've lost which is utterly amazing. Was just like, I I just I don't have a question. I've just more to observe that I feel humbled by that.
Boris Eldagsen:And the strange thing is it's all happening parallel. The good things and the bad things, yeah, the tragedies and the beauties. And we all wish for a life where it's only beauty and everything works, but the reality is it's it's pockets and moments and yeah, this is it. I have no idea. I think when I was going through those five years of drama, I was thankful for my partner to be there.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. And I hope that at some point, life is going to be easy again. And you think of a certain time when you were young and had fun and party like no one else, and then you realize, well, possibly this is going to continue. So my mom is showing first signs of dementia. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:Next, this is the next drama waiting for me. Mhmm. And I can't change it. What can I do if I can't change it? I can just go through there Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And try to solve it as best as I can and then see where it's going to lead me to.
Jim Kroft:And it's like you said, I think about being, what you said earlier, to be within the hurt, to be within it. Because this whole aspiration so often is to kind of get through or over or beyond the hurt or the pain. And the paradox is, and this is what I felt so moved by within you, about what you were talking about and I relate to it is, what about being within it and feeling it and then by doing so, recognizing that that is the transformation. But also within that transformation, God knows where it goes because you look at what's been going on in your life and the debate, because it's not just about you and this is what we'll get to, but the way that all of this stuff has led to this moment that has that becomes meaningful in a way that is so much beyond you. And you see that I think with how the community has taken on all of the things you've opened up.
Jim Kroft:And maybe the strange thing is it's a natural point to go to the berserk side of your life of everything that's happened recently. So may why why don't we just, for people that don't know the story with the Yep. Sony World Picture Awards, give them a little overview.
Boris Eldagsen:Okay. I started to experiment with AI image generators a year ago. And it's just a year. And it really helped me and I got got me energy through all of those appointments with my partner at doctor's offices and hospitals. And because I was one of the first to do in the German photo bubble, I got a lot of like feedback and interviews and press and asking to do presentations.
Boris Eldagsen:And I'm a member of photo associations. So I was talking about the topic from all different sides. And then in autumn, usually you have open calls for photo competitions. I thought, well, there was a lot of press about AI image generators in August, September. Do photo competitions think about the possibility that people hand in AI generated images?
Boris Eldagsen:I just wanted to see if they have done their homework and looked at the nitty gritties of the guidelines and they haven't. So I just thought, well, let's send an AI generated image and wait for anything to happen. I did not expect that one and the same image, the electrician, was shortlisted three times. And the third time with the Sony World Photography Awards, the open category Creative, I was selected as a winner. So I had no plan b how to continue from there.
Boris Eldagsen:But to tell them the facts and say you can disqualify me or if you would like to continue, it is important to talk about the relationship between the eye generated images and photography. I've been doing that in Germany for months. What about ZoomTalk, something open? It was never responded to. Twice it was never responded to.
Boris Eldagsen:They also didn't talk in the team. So they said, you can keep it and if you would like to come to London to the awards ceremony, you can come, but pay on your own expenses. So I thought press release is in four weeks, let's wait for the press release. And I thought it's going to be transparent in the press release, but it wasn't. And immediately that day I had inquiries from platform in Poland saying is it AI or not?
Boris Eldagsen:And I said yes, they know. And they said can you write a statement? I said yes. So I wrote a statement in half an hour. Then the PR officer from the organizers, which is not Sony but an event agency in The UK, sent me an email.
Boris Eldagsen:Listen, we have so many questions about your image. Can you send us more information? We can pass on to the press. So I had my press my statement sending it. Hours later, they responded with a smiley thank you.
Boris Eldagsen:So I could have believed they used my statement to send it out to the press, but they didn't. They wanted to keep it quiet Uh-huh. My friends with the German photo press sent me the reply. If you ask, is it AI or not? They were just responding, dear Jim, thank you for your email.
Boris Eldagsen:To quote our CEO, we support the medium and its development, creative expressions, blah. AI wasn't even mentioned.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:I asked them, why didn't you use my statement? No answer. Only the third time I pressured them. They said, it can't continue like this. You are getting emails by people that are said, I'm getting emails by people at ARB said, you need to talk about it.
Boris Eldagsen:They promised to do a Q and A Mhmm. Before the award ceremony. They didn't keep the promise. So what I did, I said, it it needs to be disruptive because otherwise they are going to be silent about it. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And that is wrong. I didn't want to have a $5,000 award for something I never really applied for. It was a test. Mhmm. It's kind
Jim Kroft:a hacker's attitude. Right?
Boris Eldagsen:Yes. I wanted to find the the the the weak spots to say you need to change something about So I bought that flight ticket, easyJet and luggage only. I rented a tuxedo in Schonenburg. If you're gay weddings, if you need a tuxedo, go there. They're the best.
Boris Eldagsen:And they even made my pants larger because I couldn't fit in. And then I was flying to London for twenty four hours at a very overpriced hotel at Hyde Park because this is where the award ceremony was. I went to this award ceremony and expected that I'm going to have stage time, but I didn't. And the event was in two parts. First part, dinner, second part, and the creative category was before dinner time.
Boris Eldagsen:And it didn't invite me on stage, so I was kind of saved by dinner break. And I thought, what am I going to do now?
Jim Kroft:So you're at this moment and you've gone there, you've got your rented tuxedo on, you haven't had your flights, paid for, you're having to pay for your own hotel, And you've got to the point where not only is there no dialogue about the award, but also you are not being given the opportunity to have the debate Yeah. Of why you were there in the first place.
Boris Eldagsen:Right. And I realized it's a money driven event.
Jim Kroft:So what's going on in your brain in that break? Because that's a big moment in your life, right?
Boris Eldagsen:Yes, yes. That that was kind of like hardcore crash course in psychotherapy. No, because I was I get it. I was writing like like my refusal speech. I was learning it by heart in the plane and I thought I can talk about it.
Boris Eldagsen:Then I couldn't. So, what can I do? I asked my British friend, he said forget about it. A guy from the German press said go and get the microphone. But that time already dinner was happening, it was noisy and loud, nobody would have listened.
Boris Eldagsen:I asked my partner, she said go and get the microphone. And then I had the the young me that was really shy, yeah, and that had all the fear of my parents and my mom. I can't do this. I've I'm not invited. I'm not part of the program.
Boris Eldagsen:Why can't I go to stage and get the microphone? And it was the older me that said, you've experienced so much bullshit. Do you want to support this bullshit? And so I'm having this debate and I was kind of figuring out do they have security, how easy Mhmm. Is it to get on stage.
Boris Eldagsen:Mhmm. And then what really was the tipping point talking about ADHD injustice was that I was allowed to bring a friend for dinner. They said yes. But after dinner they came and they wanted to have £70 for a bottle of wine because they said this is not part of the agreement. I said nobody told us about the agreement.
Boris Eldagsen:And so I said fuck it. If you are that money driven
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:I don't have to be polite. So I was waiting for the start of the second half and the host was a British BBC lady. When she was going to the microphone, I came from the other side dressed in my tuxedo, I was very friendly, was looking good. I said, excuse me, I was selected for blah blah blah, would like to say something, may I? And she was very friendly but taken by surprise and I know, it's not part of the program, maybe you need to ask the organizers.
Boris Eldagsen:And there was a lady from the organizers approaching and then I thought that, fuck it. Here's the microphone. I have learned my text by heart. It's going to be a minute. I'm going to say it now.
Boris Eldagsen:And then I was standing next to me and saying, you can't do this. This is not part of the program. Can you please leave the stage? And I was just saying my text.
Jim Kroft:And she just kept on saying it.
Boris Eldagsen:I kept on saying my text, and then I said, thank you to the audience and sorry for the interruption and have a good evening. I was going back the
Jim Kroft:I'm not surprised you apologized as well. It's just it's like this tuxedo gentleman Yeah. Disrupting and apologizing. But it's also so interesting all of this stuff going on in your brain between the shy young man dealing with those ancient fears and then that Yeah. That leader in you and also the part of you that really wanted because I know that you're very motivated to do justice with
Boris Eldagsen:the community. It's not that I wanted to lead and it's not about power. I've
Jim Kroft:thought No. No. No. But I didn't mean it like that. But But What I mean is our our life takes us to a point where it's not about wanting to do it.
Jim Kroft:You'd been put in that situation. If you hadn't done it, there would be no debate.
Boris Eldagsen:And I didn't want to take any bullshit, and I realized I'm in a position where I can make a difference Mhmm. Also for friends of mine, for the photo community, and I saw it is important to talk about it now. The photo scene was frozen in shock. The technical development was speeding up, accelerating, and that debate needed to start. So I thought it's now or never.
Boris Eldagsen:And that just got me going. And once you are over the tipping point and you've got the microphone, you just do it. And that was one of the hardest moments in my life where you could say, what do I do? Go right or left? And then I thought, if I don't go to the microphone, everything will stay how it is.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah? It doesn't matter if I do a statement on social media or if I go to the CEO on the table, they will not be interested. So it needs to be something to show I'm not going to support that bullshit.
Jim Kroft:It's the red pill or the blue pill moment in the matrix. Right?
Boris Eldagsen:It is. And the £70 bill. Fuck you.
Jim Kroft:Oh my word. And it's just like, it's so fascinating when you just think of a life and you think of this whole journey that, you know, going from the dwarf, going to India, going to Prague, going to Australia, seeing the fear, you know, feeling the fear that you didn't know where it came from then recognizing it and then later on and understanding about ADHD, trying to figure it all out, surviving as an artist, going broke, and then all the things that happened in the latter day with all of the painful experiences and the people that you've lost and your partner and it just you just think of that microcosmic moment and what I what I find so so so beautiful and very Boris is that it's almost like that bottle of wine. It's like your whole damn life was in that bill.
Boris Eldagsen:Part of, yeah.
Jim Kroft:But what I mean is that like, sometimes at the critical moment, it's like you need something winds you up a bit.
Boris Eldagsen:Yes. Yes. Yes. Definitely. Definitely.
Boris Eldagsen:And but nobody came to me that evening. It was silence, right, afterwards? No. Well, I just kept on with the like nothing happened and the program and nobody from the press that was there talked to me, nobody from the organizers. I stayed till twenty minutes later and went to the overpriced hotel, sent them an email with text of my refusal asking them not to send me the gear and to donate it.
Jim Kroft:To Ukraine. Right? You are
Boris Eldagsen:For the festival in Odessa, I know the people. I said, give it to them. Yeah. And then I posted the same text in Facebook and Instagram. I went to bed.
Boris Eldagsen:Mhmm. I was not paying a PR strategist or sending it out to journalists. And then it started to become viral while I was sleeping.
Jim Kroft:Unbelievable. And it it went to The Guardian, to The Times, live on CNN, Al Jazeera I heard, NPR. And I read somewhere that they think it it had something like 800,000,000 impressions Yeah. Which is just absolutely extraordinary. So let's talk about the artwork itself.
Jim Kroft:Because one of the fascinating things is for better or worse, for good or bad, the image that you created won. And it doesn't matter that you were rejecting it in your speech. Mhmm. It it's still one, which is such a fascinating evocation of that that you created. And I'm hoping that you might have a surprise for us and maybe be able to show it to us.
Boris Eldagsen:I do. Yes. Where do I have it? Yeah. Yeah.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. I hope the sound is still running.
Jim Kroft:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're all good.
Jim Kroft:So for people who are hello, everyone. Listening, Boris has his work from pseudo pseudomnesia.
Boris Eldagsen:I also have old photographs, so we can we can start
Jim Kroft:with it. Yeah. And so he's going to show, I believe, the experiment, which is the award winning piece. And I thought for a moment it'd just be a lovely thing. So Boris is now putting on his white gloves onto his right hand.
Jim Kroft:He is dressed in a not a tuxedo. Has a black tie on and braces, and we're experiencing high drama here, ladies and gentlemen. And he's opening the case, and out of the case is the disruptive artwork itself. This is so exciting.
Boris Eldagsen:So which camera do you want me to to show you?
Jim Kroft:Why don't you Ola, what do you think? Maybe over here? And so Okay. You know what, Boris? Let's do it.
Jim Kroft:Now show show it over here. Show it to this one behind me, and I'll keep talking. I I think let's remember people are listening without video. And so he's getting the piece so what's it printed on, Boris? What are we looking at?
Boris Eldagsen:That is a fine art paper that is printed on. It's very small and tiny size. Here we are. And that is it. Yeah.
Boris Eldagsen:That is the original in that size.
Jim Kroft:I think one of the things that's so striking about seeing it in a real, this is so wonderful, what is it the you see the texture of the work, you feel invited and drawn into it, and you might think you might have the presupposition in your mind that you're watching a a work that's been driven from AI Mhmm. That you might have some type of sort of resistance or sense of it. But what I find fascinating is how it how it draws you in. And the paradox for me is that I can see why the hell it won as a photograph. Whether you wanna call it a photograph or or we let's talk about that in a moment.
Jim Kroft:But what I mean is that, like, what I find so fascinating is that the the the prompting the I think you can take it down now, Boris. I think but what I find so fascinating is that it's not a bunch of random prop prompts. I go and use Dali sometimes, and it's like I have a bit of fun with it. But I can see in this, and I will call it a work of art because that's how I see it.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Kroft:It's I see the lifetime of experience and research into human experience and the human condition, and you see it in in the work of art.
Boris Eldagsen:I totally agree. Yeah. I loved it when I when I produced it very early last September 22. It was one of the first works you could do with DALL E two art painting. So it's 20 steps, you start with a text description and that was the two ladies and then it grows and you can add pixels And with every part you erase or you add, you need again to describe in a text prompt what you would like to appear.
Boris Eldagsen:And that has 20 loops, so it's not one text prompt, it's 20.
Jim Kroft:But is that your 20 prompts? Is that your process?
Boris Eldagsen:Yes. That's what I used last year.
Jim Kroft:And so did you when you say 20 prompts, was that with that one work of art or was that a system that you developed towards creating the works that you're making?
Boris Eldagsen:Last year, September, I was just trying out the tool. Yeah. I started
Jim Kroft:understand you.
Boris Eldagsen:No. I started in July. And now I have a system. I can also I'm teaching workshops on AI images since January, and I got deep into that over the years because, over the years, over the months. If you prompt and use all the different platforms and try out things, you realize there is a certain structure to it, there is a certain system that you can put in words, that you can explain to others.
Jim Kroft:And so in terms of why do you think that work of art no. Forget Boris Eldagsen. I'm talking about why do you think that it actually won? Forgetting the debate, I mean, as a work of art. What what what do you see
Boris Eldagsen:as its qualities? It is a strong work of art that has all the qualities I want my work to have. For me, an artwork is not what does the artist want to tell us. That's very patronizing. For me an artwork is an impulse for an inner journey.
Boris Eldagsen:It is you that should ask yourself, am I attracted by it? Am I appalled? What kind of ideas, memories, thoughts, emotions are triggered? Why? So a good artwork is, has a certain openness, so you can enter with your personality and with your personal interpretation.
Boris Eldagsen:If I'm going to tell you this is what I wanted, you can't enter. Yeah? It's just destroying the quality an artwork should have that each person is interpreting differently. When I give you my interpretation, it's a limitation, you try to see what I have told you. And you're not trying to find yourself in it and to become aware of yourself.
Jim Kroft:And once the story broke out, one of the things that I find very, like, profound is the extent to which okay. There was the interest in it. What do you think the it feels like the interest in it was almost beyond what happened.
Boris Eldagsen:Mhmm.
Jim Kroft:Like, it was almost like there was some type of universal because it was one of those stories. It was literally so ubiquitous. It was almost like a very, very famous person had suddenly passed away. You know, like, it's one of those stories that you remember in your life. And but what do you think it tapped into?
Boris Eldagsen:Many things at the same time. We are talking about a new technology, and it became clear that this can be used to produce art. Mhmm. So talking about art, what is art? Does art need to be to have a human off the ship?
Boris Eldagsen:Can it be produced by a machine? Is it still art? But people don't see that working like I do, it's a tool. It's it's something you need to learn to master. And it makes a difference who is using the tool.
Boris Eldagsen:It's not an autonomous machine. But this is a fear. Why? We can talk about. The second thing is that for society, we still have kind of trusted on photographic or or images looking like photography that they represent an event, the world, something that has happened.
Boris Eldagsen:We know it is possible to fake it. It has been possible to fake it for a hundred years. I remember that famous image of Lenin and Trotsky who was taken out of the picture. But we still have this trust that photograph could show me something that has happened and now we have a radical shift. In the future, our default mode at looking onto images that look like photography, in my point of view, should be mistrust.
Boris Eldagsen:Should be it's possibly generated unless it's proven otherwise and had a certain quality check. How can we make this quality check? What is the potential of disinformation for democracies, especially combined with social media? What are the worst case scenarios? So this is also something.
Boris Eldagsen:And then the third question for the photo community is how can we continue from now on? How can we do photo museums, photo festivals, photo galleries? Are we only showing photography? What is photography? For some AI is the logical path from photography from analog to digital.
Boris Eldagsen:Mhmm. They talk about the outcome, I talk about the process. Is it a good thing to put AI generated images that look like photography and photography in the same basket or not.
Jim Kroft:I wonder Boris, whether part of the universal thing that it tapped into was it's the question of authenticity. Mhmm. And but what I mean by authenticity, okay, on the superficial nature, we have this worry about our work and, is it authentic? Is it an AI generated image? What you're you're showing is that it's well, the authenticity is is the human is completely present within the interaction with the process.
Jim Kroft:It's a dynamism. It's as existent as anything else that exists in society. But I wonder whether the sort of the outrage part because you've got the curiosity and you've got the fear and all the rest of it. But I wonder if the the what what you've summoned up, the sort of demon you've summoned up is a deeper demon that we have within ourselves at this point in time. Because when you think about sort of, like, the digital world, and this is this predates AI.
Jim Kroft:You have and it's not sort of like, Jean Boudreaux idea of a simulacrum. So you have yourself, and then you make a replication of yourself into the digital sphere. And then that version of you, you're like, oh, I'm going to make it a bit better than I am. So I'm going to have this self that's online that's a bit better than I am, and then that becomes quite addictive and fun. And then you start replicating that across different platforms, something that does not represent the origin.
Jim Kroft:So it's it's disconnected from the original referent, and it's become something in and of itself. But then it becomes so real and so sort of ubiquitous that the original referent is like, I've lost control of this. Mhmm. And then suddenly, there is a disconnection between the authenticity and the inauthenticity. And I think when you sort of look at why people are struggling so much psychological online, especially teenagers, often well, if you look at celebrities, they have disconnected the referent of who they are is existing in millions of people, and they're trying to uphold this sort of carcass of a notion of themselves that's completely perfected and false, and it leads to absolutely terrible consequences on the mind.
Jim Kroft:And I think something in your work, it it feels like you've they've summoned up this this fear we have because we don't know who we who we are on some level because we are also so distracted by the ubiquity of social media and post and the ping pongs and the notifications and the bleeps and all of the rest of it that we can't we can't concentrate to a degree where we can have that foundational notion of what we are for like what you were talking earlier about between good and evil beyond good and evil, all of these things. Why my heart was like, why my whole sense of being was deepening when you were speaking. So I was like, man, this man is creating this debate, which is the most profound debate. And yet, why is it you that is promote that is that is stimulating this? And I'm like, I would venture and say because I think you have as deeper understanding of the human condition, I think as anyone I've ever met Boris or as much of, you know, it's not a scale.
Jim Kroft:And so I feel like something has been pulled up like a reverse exorcism.
Boris Eldagsen:I see two things that are very important here. One is the notion of creativity. Mhmm. Is that something that is uniquely human? Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:Do we need to save this for us? What is creativity? And the second thing is why do we really want to create artificial intelligence? I don't think we will be able to stop until we have managed it. It seems to be an unconscious drive that we want to be like God in the old testament and create something that is a resemblance to us.
Boris Eldagsen:That will not stop. And if you look back into generations and stories of mankind across cultures and times, it is one of the leading narratives, yeah. If you talk about the Golem or Frankenstein or the Sorcerer's Apprentice, humans invent something and then it gets out of control.
Jim Kroft:The fear of the creation.
Boris Eldagsen:That has always been attached to our creations. And then the same thing is why do we create in the first place if things can go out of control? But I think we cannot stop this development until we get as mankind to a point where we manage to get some create something that is more or less as potent intelligence like us. At the same time then we are afraid, yeah, and we project our condition into the machine. We are good and bad at the same time, So of course the machine, if it gets consciousness that resembles us, will also be mean and evil and come to the point where it's going to erase us.
Boris Eldagsen:I think that is just a projection. Yeah. And the second thing about creativity, is it really human? Can a machine replace it? And that is the fear of many creatives, that they are not needed anymore.
Boris Eldagsen:Mhmm.
Jim Kroft:So let's play this out. So, okay, on the one hand, you've got the paper maximizer theory where AI is creating so many damn paper clips that we are made into paper clips. Good luck with that, by the way, Boris. But if you play it out, just on a philosophical level, it's like, well, okay, we are creating something that is we are biologically bound. We are we have fantastic brains, but we're still bound by that neural network.
Jim Kroft:And the climate is changing. We've already you know, we are entering an age of solitude, where we have destroyed many of the larger mammals and now it's going down into insects like bees, which are suffering from human beings is unknowable tragedy. And you can look at it as tragedy or you can just look at it at that it is. And that's a different type of thing. But what I mean is that if you play it out, going cosmically, maybe our only potential future destination is to go out into space, but we know how large space is.
Jim Kroft:So surely, we have to we have to overcome our biological limits, and that might mean sacrificing that which we were to become that which we are. And that might mean that that I mean, we will always be the the godfather or mother or god of create of of AI. And it very may well be what future species out in space come across. Or maybe it is AI that eventually populate space and becomes the aliens that we wish that we could find. And then they replicate into type of different things.
Jim Kroft:But like, could you see it playing out that way? Do you think this this, like, on a cosmic level, do you think this is an inevitability of creation that it should get to this point or celebration of creation?
Boris Eldagsen:What we have now is not a conscious machine.
Jim Kroft:Yet.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. It is all mathematics and probability. Mhmm.
Jim Kroft:So do you think it will become conscious then?
Boris Eldagsen:I have no clue. No. It can happen. Yeah. It might happen.
Boris Eldagsen:I might be dead by the time. Mhmm. I have no clue. It could be possible. I think we really want this to happen.
Jim Kroft:So you think subliminally we want it to happen?
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. I think it is going to happen if it's happening in five years, fifty years, five hundred years, I don't know.
Jim Kroft:Do you think that's just because it's too exciting to damn well be able to play God and see what happens? Like do you think it's a megalomaniac thing in mankind?
Boris Eldagsen:Maybe, yeah. Maybe, good old Freud was right, yeah, that we have an eros and Thanatos drive, which is like old school psychology, nobody believes in that anymore, but as a philosophical idea. It's fascinating.
Jim Kroft:And it is?
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. Well, if we have this drive to to die, yeah, and the same time we have to the drive to procreate create, it's two sides. Yeah? And how can they cooperate or are they fighting against each other?
Jim Kroft:Life and death forever at war with one another.
Boris Eldagsen:Maybe, maybe not. It always depends on how you look at the human condition. And the basis question is, what do you think? Is man by nature good, by nature bad or both? And just from those assumptions you can build whole theories of how a state should be structured, of how a society should be structured.
Boris Eldagsen:Mhmm. But they are all assumptions.
Jim Kroft:Well, what I draw from the the paper clip maximizer maximizer theory is that if if you are okay. You've got two choices if you're an engineer creating AI. Well, there you go. Either you do not implement any type of you just trust the code and see where it leads, and perhaps that leads to a perfected notion form of code. Yeah.
Jim Kroft:Whatever that may be, I'm not speculating on that. But alternatively, and this is one of the interesting things I find about the AI debate. Okay, how are we gonna regulate it? How are we going to put in ethics into it? How are we going to try and train morality into it?
Jim Kroft:And it's like, well, good luck with that, mate. Have you seen what human beings have done to each other since since we became this species and probably before? It's it's it's I mean, the only thing that makes that chills me more than the indifference of creating infinite paper clips or, you know, or rather the indifference of that that way is trying to put human morality into it. It's like, damn, man. You gotta be careful with that.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. But which one?
Jim Kroft:Yeah. As in which which morality? That's the point.
Boris Eldagsen:The problem starts. Yeah. And if you talk about morality that comes from morals, morals, it just means what people do, like habits, customs. It's not a set of values. It's just like which people are we looking at, how do they behave.
Boris Eldagsen:That is morality.
Jim Kroft:And the ticking time bomb that every morality has with the next morality before it starts clashing with it. Well, look, Boris, I'd I'd No.
Boris Eldagsen:I mean, I we have so many ticking time bombs.
Jim Kroft:Well, you created a ticking time bomb, so I would say that Boris Eldagsen is as guilty as anyone.
Boris Eldagsen:I I created nothing of the AI we have. What my aim is is to pass on knowledge and to create awareness and to show complexity of it. The closer I, the deeper I look into it, the more I realize, like also with morality, it's all gray. It's very hard to say you are the good guys, you are the bad guys.
Jim Kroft:And I was of course teasing because that's why I was so hopeful to speak with you at this moment because it just raises the questions of, it's so multi dimensional and multi colored, it's kaleidoscopic, It goes into every single aspect of human consciousness, and it takes someone, I think, who is an artist and a philosopher to prompt the society to start looking at the prompts that we're putting into it. And one of the things that I find sort of interesting about the AI, just to briefly ask you about the potential impacts on a sort of moral level, and especially about, okay, the people that have that that are following the maths and working on the code. So obviously, the Oppenheimer movie is coming out. And I watched this interview of Oppenheimer being asked about the atomic bomb and it's it's absolutely, I mean, it just it sort of makes your your heart curdle because, you know, unlike, say, Nixon who was sort of very defiant about sort of some of his, you know, crimes or or however you wanted to put it because, of course, that's a a loaded way of talking about Oppenheimer in a wrong way, so I wouldn't put that across.
Jim Kroft:But he was there, and he was so connected to both that which he created and that which it had done and as well as, I think kind of torn apart by the being no safe footing in the morality. There's the abomination that it happened, that it could ever be that a bomb could ever be put over anyone. I mean, and then they're weighing it up next to the millions of lives that are going to die one by one during the second world war if you play out the scenario. So they're basically, they have two different models they're following, terrible as it is to describe it, but that's what was happening. And then he comes to the end of the interview and he quotes the Bhagavad Gita and he says, Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.
Jim Kroft:And yet, when they were creating it, they were following the and he did talk about this, I think, a different time the excitement of the math, you know, the excitement of being on the pursuit and having the funds to kind of do what even Einstein said couldn't be done. What responsibilities do you think the AI engineers have who are following the maths?
Boris Eldagsen:I think to communicate the dangers as they see them and to join forces to think together what they could do to prevent certain things. But then you have certain approaches, like, if you talk to Bjorn Omer, who is the head of the Teredo Pal Group who did stable diffusion, he said, it's not dangerous, the dangerous part is, social media. And he said we go open source because it can't be exploited by the big companies. We invite the scientists to contribute and we work together. Whereas the models of open AI financed by Microsoft is a black box.
Boris Eldagsen:We don't know how it works, what is inside, it's a business secret.
Jim Kroft:And I reassured you?
Boris Eldagsen:No. I'm not a I'm not a programmer. I I I am I'm listening. I try to learn. I've I've tried to figure out how it works.
Boris Eldagsen:I think I have done it. If it's dangerous, what are the dangers? I don't know. For me, it's mathematical probabilities. That is what I can say.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And I also believe it can't be stopped. Like, even if you have, like, half of them saying we need to stop now and to think about it Mhmm. The other half would continue. Yeah. And look on Elon Musk, he said we need to stop.
Boris Eldagsen:He was one of the founders of OpenAI then got out. Did he stop? No, he just opened his own AI business recently. We can't stop it.
Jim Kroft:The addiction.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah, and if you talk about Oppenheimer, I grew up with German Swiss literature, Buhrmannat. You know the physica, the physicians?
Jim Kroft:No, I don't.
Boris Eldagsen:Not a physician. What is physica in English? Physics.
Jim Kroft:Yeah, you would say
Boris Eldagsen:physician. Yeah. So it plays in a madhouse and you think, who are those people? And later it turns out, they are all scientists that decided to play mad, so they end up locked behind bars so their knowledge can't be exploited. That is like
Jim Kroft:a Wow.
Boris Eldagsen:It's a sixties, late sixties, early seventies book.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm. Mhmm. Wow. Wow. Lock out the geniuses.
Boris Eldagsen:No. They lock themselves up.
Jim Kroft:Oh, lock themselves up, I
Boris Eldagsen:see why. They don't say you need to stop, they just say our knowledge is dangerous, we want to keep it by ourselves, what is the safest plan? We play mad.
Jim Kroft:And so just to talk about the impact on younger artists for a moment, specifically, so after the recent developments, there's been, I'd seen sort of heartbreaking YouTube videos of artists who've trained for years who are like, this machine can do what I've been training for ten years to do, or artists who have just come out of university who have spent their young life learning through this design. And I of course, one feels an automatic empathy with with with with that. And and one of the quotation which I read about you, which I found very powerful, and this is what I wanted to ask you about about, okay, what would be your guidance to those younger artists? And I find this this fascinating quote, you need to be aware of you need to be aware and of the possibilities to learn how to survive it. I think I'm mishmashing your quote, but to be you need to be aware of it and to learn how to survive it.
Jim Kroft:And so I'm just wondering, like, with the sort of the young artists at that point, because obviously, what you've done is rather than being threatened by the medium, you've thought you've used you know, you're you're an older artist, you have all those years of experience. You also had a life experience, which also was part of I think you're the type artist that would have played with it anyway. But you could draw upon years and years of knowledge of being open to things because I think once you've become to a certain age or of experience in the arts, you get to that openness that is like beyond itself. And when you're starting out, you're limiting yourself because you're just trying to figure out, okay, rent and how to get your work out and where am I gonna get out. But to those people who are feeling this sense of tragedy or loss, what would be your message or guidance to them?
Boris Eldagsen:Connect with the reason why they started to produce artwork. And what can be replaced is everything that has no materiality. Like a painter will never be threatened by AI. You can copy a painting, but in the end it's a digital file.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And you can print it and you will feel by the materiality, it's not a painting. Mhmm. Missing the smell. The photographs are threatened because with digital photography, at the end it's a file and it's printed on the same paper like you can print AI generated images. So it's the medium of art we are talking about.
Boris Eldagsen:Some of them are safer than others. And also, it's very important to realize that it creates new freedom. Just love to work with it because I have no material restrictions anymore. And I always had material restrictions. I always had a problem where do I find models that are willing to do the crazy things I would like them to do?
Boris Eldagsen:Is it dark or light outside? Is it too cold? All of this doesn't matter. I can work out of my imagination. Yes, I have an advantage.
Boris Eldagsen:This is what I like about it, that you can bring your knowledge of image making into the process and make a difference with 20, yeah, you don't have it. Mhmm. But you still have ideas and visions. And I had ideas when I was 20 that I could not put into photography. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:I could put some of them into drawing, but I had to drive in the energy. I wanted to create those images, and if you have to drive in the energy, I think you can play with those tools. Mhmm. And the tools are going to become more and more and more and more. So don't wait to understand it because the longer you wait, the more you have to keep up on.
Jim Kroft:Thank you for that Boris. I'd like to also just add a personal reflection that When I was starting out in music 2002, 2003, and it was completely concurrent with Napster and with file sharing and no industry ever tanked like the music industry right at the point where I was setting out. And so I had to go through this kind of catastrophe in the industry while also just witnessing rather than this community spirit in the art, it was like all of the artists, all of the bands were fighting for the relics out of the major labels. And it was a pretty awful thing because the kind of community didn't sort of help itself. This is back when I was in London.
Jim Kroft:And that was one of things that triggered me to come over to Berlin because I was like, I think similar to you, I realized I am going to do this irrespective of society and the gods and what happens to be happening. I felt like I had something that I needed to get out, that demon if you like. And so I came over to Berlin and I was like, I'm just going to go so deep into the underground and I'm just going to trust into that process. And I've gone through my ups and downs in music. But the thing that has fascinated me is that that which I set out to do never happened in the way that I set out to make it happen.
Jim Kroft:And everything that happened in my life that makes sense and that has made me whoever I am today and has brought me the life that I'm within today has come almost exclusively out of what the musical path hasn't given me as a result of having to work through the edges. So why I say a personal reflection there, it's more just if there was a younger artist who is in that sort of state of fear or anxiety about it, it's just to say, I really resonate with the advice that you gave. It's about embrace the world, embrace that path and embrace who you are and just damn well trust in it because it will lead you somewhere, you just don't know where it will.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. And and also if you have, disparate interests, yeah, I had many different ways that I was working and forms and I thought, how can I make this become one? It happens naturally. And even if you need to do different jobs, yeah, to pay the rent, again this is going to bring you new skills and at some moment in time you can use it. And when I had the media inquiries after the refusal, it was like I could use all the things I have done in my life.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:I have been teaching for twenty years, I have been creating art for thirty years, I worked as a freelancer in the digital industry, I could use it. Mhmm. Suddenly I said, I'm ready. If you want me to talk live to you on BBC, let's do it. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And the way you do it is you don't think how many people are going to watch. I have been doing online talks for Deutsche Photographers Academy for years. They are like fifty, eighty people watching live. And so when I was talking to the media, it was like this. It was the same interface, my laptop, and I didn't think about the people watching.
Boris Eldagsen:I had one person that I was talking to. Mhmm. And we had a conversation.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:Because if you think about the potential of, yeah, the reach and the people that watch it, you're turning crazy.
Jim Kroft:Well, I think one of the things that I also draw upon from your path is that when you got to Australia and you went broke, you had to apply for jobs that you probably weren't necessarily planning on doing. I mean, it's wonderful that you embraced it. What lecturing, obviously, you've been interested in philosophy and you're a right man and rest of it. But the lecturing formulates the ideas in a communicable And there's a
Boris Eldagsen:sort of superpower
Jim Kroft:through making the journey and the effort to communicate your ideas. So when that moment happened in your life, well, it wasn't an accident that the interest happened, but it was also that you were able to communicate the ideas in such a transportable way that could lead it. And so that, you know, you said, well, I've no interest in being a leader. Well, that's why you became the leader that you are on the debate because you've worked on that through a lifetime to get to that eloquence and that understanding. And it's like, I mean, who knows how things make sense, but I I see I I I don't I don't wanna try and make sense of it, but I see the story there.
Boris Eldagsen:It's it's all connected. The way for me to combine philosophy and visual arts in one study was to have a teaching degree.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:So I have a proper teaching degree. I could start at high school tomorrow, but I didn't want to go there. But I could use it in my lifetime. When I was a student, I was co financing myself with teaching first aid lessons for people who wanted to do a driver's license. So all of this was a training.
Boris Eldagsen:And I think, what you need is to have open eyes, to be open for what is happening and coming to you, and then responding and using skills you have. Mhmm. The whole it it was never planned that I am becoming like newspaper I was writing today. I'm the poster boy of the AI debate. I'm 53.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. I'm not a poster boy. It's very very funny. Yeah. But it it I was just saying yes to people coming and and asking me.
Boris Eldagsen:I was basically playing around with the tools. I was posting it in social media, then I had the first guy who knew me, would you like to give us an interview? Is this all new and fascinating? I said yes. And then they said, would you like to make a presentation at a photo fair?
Boris Eldagsen:I said yes. And then I improved the presentation in December for Deutsche Puttograft Jagged in me, we recorded it properly and that went viral in the photo scene. And then I had somebody saying, would you like to teach it? I said yes. So none of that was part of my master plan, but people saw it, approached me and I said, I can do it, I'm ready.
Boris Eldagsen:And so it went month by month.
Jim Kroft:What I find is, just as we come to the end, but I just find it so moving that there's so much inquiry in your life, there's so much pain in corners. And then there's always that internal spark of curiosity and interest that seems to be like the sort of guiding spirit, if you like. And I just find it so moving that through all of that and all of those corners where it might have made sense to pragmatically walk away or try to do something different or even to do the teaching, that it all has led into this story of where you're at. And it didn't need this moment for all of it to make sense. And as I said earlier, that for me, that's all it's almost and for me in this in this conversation, it's almost like an afterthought.
Jim Kroft:It's a fantastic, wonderful thing. But it's almost it's also a wonderful culmination because it comes out of everything. And like just to finish off Boris, I wondered if I could just ask you to, you know, if you were to just really sort of say a message to the world or to the spirit or whatever the hell it is that's out there or something that might need to be said. It was just to ask you to draw upon something like your life, to leave the audience with a sort of thought or prayerful moment, however one would describe it. If you try and summarize something for us.
Boris Eldagsen:But one thing I already said, it's fear. Become aware of your personal fears where they come from and try to work to overcome it somehow. It's going to improve your life dramatically. For me this is the opposite of happiness is not being unhappy, it's fear. The more fear you take away, the more happy you're going to become.
Boris Eldagsen:And I would like to thank the photo community, it's their work that made it big. Yeah. It could have been just two posts on my social media accounts of like 20 likes and that's it. But it was single photographers translating my statement and interviews into their languages. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And I had one guy from China who sent me, I've put it up and translated your interview. The next day he said 50,000 clicks and the next day I got interview inquiry by a Chinese newspaper. So it's them and they talk and communicate it. And my message is that communication is what we need. We need more communication, more transparency, more open communication and because this is what the organizers of the competition didn't want to have, why it became so big and why they failed.
Boris Eldagsen:They could have had it in the very first moment when I told them, but we are not willing to have this conversation. And then the conversation started without them. But even bigger than it would have been possible in my imagination.
Jim Kroft:And what a beautiful way to finish and to summarize, to say that it's the communication skill, as but also to look after and to develop your community, because is something that your community is about people ultimately, and because it's so easy to feel alone as an artist. And it's just amazing how your inquiry and that hacker's attitude and that challenge to authority and to the gatekeepers of the arts has been resonating, it's been taken out into the world.
Boris Eldagsen:People helped me, people that you helped me. Two years two two weeks ago, I was at a festival in Arles, and then I met the organizers of a of an Asian festival. And they said it did work because people know you and they know that you are not talking nonsense. And yes, but that took ten years to get to know the photography world and to have those contacts.
Jim Kroft:And a lifetime before that as well. Yeah. Going to every corner of the earth practically.
Boris Eldagsen:I did love traveling.
Jim Kroft:Yes. Boris, thank you so much. Yes. To finish off, like, you took a moment a few days after when all that anarchy was going on. I just just to say hello, and I'm proud of you.
Jim Kroft:And it always meant so much to me just like you gave me that book. You just took a moment. So Jamie, it's it's absolutely mental. But you just took a moment. It meant a lot to me.
Jim Kroft:And it means even so much that you've come down to speak on this and I I just I feel very happy and thankful.
Boris Eldagsen:I really think this is important just to to answer communication. I have a folder of private people that send me messages that I haven't been able to respond to because of my workload, but I'm going to do this over summer. I don't want those emails to be unresponded.
Jim Kroft:We'll look after you along the way Boris. Thank you again.
Boris Eldagsen:You're welcome.
Jim Kroft:Thank you, man.
Boris Eldagsen:What a great conversation. We need more of those conversations.
Jim Kroft:Just feel so moved to have been able to, you know, because it's just like, it's so much on my there's so much that I learned through it about how to be. And because you're always learning, and it's just like, you know, you're you're ten years down the line or whatever it is, a bit older than me, and and it's just you know, I'm always learning and figuring stuff out, it's just to go step deep into that path and also just to check-in with mortality. That really resonated so much and the people you've lost along the way. It was like, you know, I I just find the fact that you weren't you you're daring not to hide, that that's there's so much knowledge. But we we
Boris Eldagsen:all we all share it. And and it shows that there is a limit to all of things we do.
Jim Kroft:We're just gonna dive back in for a second because we just had such an interesting chat immediately afterwards. And Boris, the pandemic hit. Right? Let's I don't know if you wanna call it an existential crisis of the soul, but something happened to you. Like, what what happened to you when the pandemic hit?
Jim Kroft:Where did you go?
Boris Eldagsen:I talked about it briefly before. I had a long term friend who had a brain cancer and then wanted to die in Switzerland. And I went there with another friend. Mhmm. And there's nothing that can you prepare for this.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. How do you have a last supper? How do you have a last breakfast? And what do you do when somebody who is as old as you just dies in your arms? How does it look like?
Boris Eldagsen:Mhmm. It's weird. Yeah. It is really that within seconds, the pulse is gone and then the color of your face is changing. And you realize your friend is no more and it goes like this.
Boris Eldagsen:And I had a similar experience when I was 30 with my father dying at home. That is really existential. And then I turned 50 and I thought, is this it? My friend is dead, he doesn't come back. I'm old now, I might die as well soon, who knows?
Boris Eldagsen:And was it worth to invest my time being an artist, trying to make a difference, achieve something and I was part of a community, but in a niche. And then you think. And of course you say, sometimes you tell yourself maybe it was all just a waste of time and maybe I should have started a family, but the same time, and these inner conversations are really important, you realize no, this is what I wanted. Then you realize this is where I get my energy from and there was no other option that would have made me happier. So even if I was unhappy and in the second midlife crisis, I said this is what I wanted and I'm going to continue.
Boris Eldagsen:But it is a Sisyphus work and of course it is exhausting over and over again. Even now I have moments where it is exhausting and tiring, but at the same time it's beautiful and rewarding, and you continue. And everything I said before is taking care of yourself remains important. Did I miss anything about the conversation we had privately?
Jim Kroft:No, it's just I think that I think this is such a powerful question. An artist at this point in their life having that night of the soul where one asks, was it worth it? What was Was the sacrifice worth it? And it hit me very hard when he said, well, I didn't have children. Like, was that what I really wanted?
Jim Kroft:Is this it? Is this the the reward of the sacrifice? Where's the fucking reward? And I think as an older artist, you know that space. And and don't get me wrong.
Jim Kroft:I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about I understand it as an artist in my my forties because I have had similar nights. And, you know, I've worked very hard at my mental health, and I've I've stared deep into the lagoon of those thoughts. And I'm with them, and I'm present with them, and I'm capable of sitting with them and I'm okay as well like I I with with with my choices. But hell, on those nights of the soul when it's dark and there's nothing else there and you have that experience of that aloneness, it can come in like a demon with saber teeth into you.
Jim Kroft:And that's the dread as well when you're a younger artist because it's like, I do not want to be that potential. And one of the things that you have to learn along the path is that you may find yourself there. Are you ready? Do you are you serious enough about that that you're doing that you can be there and you have to be deadly serious about your work?
Boris Eldagsen:It can change, but it can continue like this, that people have no interest. I was doing my night photography for ten years because I just loved doing it and nobody was interested in. And then ten years ago when I started to be part of that portfolio review photography community, there were German curators who said, why don't I know this? And I said, well, nobody cared. It was like you are put on an on an island somewhere in nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, and you are alone.
Boris Eldagsen:And of course, you just do things and and do whatever that comes to your mind. And ten years later, a boat drives by and picks you up and think, look at that crazy person and all the stuff he was building on that island. But that was my feeling when when after ten years of photographing, had a first interest in my photography. And I still, there is no guarantee that there is going to be an interest in my artwork in the future. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:I'm still giving a 100%. Those trends come and go. I continue to do what I do and I do it because I need to do it. But I think also those times where you think nobody cares what I do, Is it worth investing all the time and money? They are natural.
Boris Eldagsen:They are I think an important part of it as a grounding to get deeper, and that is also going to change your artwork as well. Yeah. It feeds back.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm. And I think that for me the reward is the knowledge that comes out of the path. Yeah. And because with the knowledge comes, I think, two things. One is the appreciation of the thing itself and the thing itself is life, love being within that.
Jim Kroft:And the second thing is the passing on of of of everything, all the knowledge and the insight that you accrue and knowing that you can alleviate someone else's suffering or doubt or or pain, but also to inspire because those moments when you have those dark nights of the soul, they aren't the ending. No. They are they are just a part of the pattern along the way. And it's like every time I think that I have to return to one of those places, I often think it's because life has readied me to go deeper into that space and that I'm I'm more prepared to delve into it. And I'm also on a metaphorical level, I no longer think about kinda climbing out of that hell.
Jim Kroft:I think about, like like, deepening like like, getting into the river of life, like you get a pickaxe and you start smashing the hell out of it. Because below it, it's not about climbing out of hell, it's about the the there's something beneath it and then that's where the real excitement happens. Beyond good and evil, pain and suffering, just the capacity to be and be within the wonder, which is I think why you gave me this book all those years ago because it You adds to
Boris Eldagsen:needed it. I had to, and I knew that you would love it.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:And that it might give you some consolation, and it did. And it
Jim Kroft:and it has done. As our friendship, which is this is just a another island along the way. Thank you, Boris.
Boris Eldagsen:Well, thank you. Thank you.
Jim Kroft:Okay. That's the end of the second ending, ladies and gentlemen. But if we're going to be with Boris Eldagsen, there will be no ending. Thank you, guys. Yay.
Jim Kroft:I'm really glad. I I don't like reshoots, but Hold on Boris. You got it again? You got it again?
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. Want me to start again? Yeah. Yeah? Okay.
Boris Eldagsen:When I was teaching in Australia, they had on Wednesday mornings talks of international artists coming, talking about their work and their life and they were always success stories. They had been discovered early in their lives in their mid twenties and then they went everywhere and now they are famous and have famous friends. And I did my talk about failures. I was talking about the the moments in my life where the career went downhill and continuing and that actually made a difference for the students and they said, I'm so happy to hear this because if you compare yourself to those success stories, how can you give up
Jim Kroft:to it? One
Boris Eldagsen:thing that my professor was one thing that my professor was doing badly is oh, I I switch off the He's fine. No problem. He told us you need to be successful until you are 35, after that it's over. Really? Yes.
Boris Eldagsen:Then you just move it. And of course the the the
Jim Kroft:Damn man.
Boris Eldagsen:The main success story, the young artist anymore is you are going to an art school and it's famous, you have a famous professor, they get in the people and the connections and then you are discovered in your mid twenties. And then if you are part of that circle, you will just move up. But if you are not part of this elite art school, if you don't have the connections, you're just fucked.
Jim Kroft:Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:Yeah. What is plan b? You need to move you up with luck, you need to hang out at the openings and at some point you realize I'm not a young artist anymore, who is going to discover me? And these are like the guidelines that kind of exist still And I did like Roger Bellin as an artist, as a photographer. He became successful in his late forties.
Boris Eldagsen:He's now an uncle for me and I have been working for him in the past years and he is somebody I learned a lot from. Also that it is possible to have different paths, to create a body of work that at a certain age is just right and people see it and acknowledge it. And then there is like a normal way how to do it, which is always easier. Mhmm. But it is important to tell stories of failures.
Boris Eldagsen:We all have them, but we don't share it. Mhmm. Yeah. And social media kind of taught us to be perfect all the time and to tell success stories. Yeah.
Boris Eldagsen:My experience is whenever I was sharing failure, you get much better, stronger responses than just telling, hey, yeah, I'm in the guardian, hey, I'm here. Yeah. Yes, that can happen, but yeah, it happens and then there's the next day and the next week and the next month and nobody cares anymore. That can happen too. Mhmm.
Boris Eldagsen:Or you continue to grow into what direction. It is luck, it is persistence and it is keeping yourself motivated and driven. And one last sentence and we can finish on this is something I had to thank my father for. My mom was the person with having like the calendars on the wall with all the sayings, for what is this about. And then when I was leaving home starting as a student, he was writing by hand a quote on a piece of paper and giving it to me.
Boris Eldagsen:He had never done anything like this before and he said, talent is not the most important thing, it is persistence. And I think that really helped me through the years, being reminded of that, also realizing how many of my friends just gave it up. Right. They dropped out and they changed professions. And I thought, well, maybe I just need to get old enough to be a survivor to be seen.
Boris Eldagsen:It kind of happened.
Jim Kroft:Wow. And to link back to your dad's note. Yeah.
Boris Eldagsen:Cut. Or we are going to have a fourth alone.
Jim Kroft:Just to say it's not the success or the failure, it's the growth. That was one thing you success, not the failure, but the growth. And the other thing being it's about the persistence as a life idea, not as a day
Boris Eldagsen:to day idea. I truly believe in failing forward.
Jim Kroft:Yeah. Failing forward. Amen. Boris Eldagsen.