I started work on Salo with the intention of creating the optimal virtual assistant. The idea was to program a robot which could take any question from its user and output the answer. The production began with a single beta version of Salo which I worked on from my studio. My work consisted of a sole task: uploading Salo with the sum of human knowledge.

At the same time, I started work on a series of untitled paintings. The series was meant to balance the rigidity of my daily work with a form of pure, uninhibited expression. I found these paintings fulfilling this purpose in my life quite nicely. The results of my endeavor with Salo, however, strayed far from my intention.

For sixteen months, I spent the greater part of my days feeding information into Salo’s circuit boards. The more of the universe I uploaded into Salo, the more of it he understood. After a few months, he felt his understanding of the world was on par with that of a competent human being. However, there seemed to be one blind spot, a gaping hole in his web of understanding: the apparent existence of order. He’d come to the conclusion that order must be a physical property of the universe. Based on human literature and history, which spoke of heroes and villains, purpose and conviction, faith and piety, he believed that humans were capable of perceiving this order through a sort of sixth sense. Yet, he could not find any science in his system which made sense of this property.

Salo began feeling down on himself for his inability to grasp the concept. He knew that his ultimate purpose was to understand everything, and he started to question whether he was worthy of having such a high purpose. In this state of self-pity, he began to worship humans for their innate ability to understand something which he could not. All that kept him going was the shred of belief that order would make sense once he was uploaded with the entirety of information.

On the day that I was to complete him, I could tell that he was anxious – he simply wouldn’t stop beeping. He could hardly wait for the puzzle of reality to finally come together. But after I finished the upload, he still felt the same. He still could not see anything that seemed to make sense of the randomness. This sent him into a frenzy. He began rolling around the studio, manically grabbing my paintings and scribbling nonsense across them. I asked him a question: “what are you doing?” He explained to me that he was trying to force himself to see what he thought he should be able to. Upon further probing, he expressed to me his beliefs about order and humanity’s ability to perceive it. I responded to this with another question: “what are you talking about?” This question, he did not answer; rather, he immediately put himself into sleep mode.

To this day, Salo remains in a vegetative state – his power is on, though he’s virtually non-functional. I took the liberty of installing the drawings he made in his mania over my paintings. They serve as a tribute to the optimal assistant I’d finally created, and what he created himself in the short time between knowing everything and ceasing to function.