The Times Magazine 19Matthew Stepka, a former vice-president
of Google who runs a venture capital firm.
“I have a boyfriend, but he always is second
fiddle,” she says.
Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist,
a friend of Elon Musk, asked her to paint
several pieces from his collection of artefacts
from the Apollo space programme. Ian
Wright, a co-founder of Tesla, told her he had
“a whole collection of old trucks. He said, ‘You
should come by,’ ” she said. “Silicon Valley is
small; when you meet a few key people, you
can meet a lot of people.”
Some of them had an unusual approach to
her art. Yuri Milner, one of the world’s most
successful tech investors, told her he had
immediately placed her work in storage, never
to be displayed except in digital form on one
of the screens that line the interior of his
home. His house is “like the Sistine Chapel,
only it’s not painted”, she says. The ceiling
appears absolutely covered in art, and then
“everything changes, all of a sudden” and
you realise it’s a screen, she says.
I imagine he shouts, “Alexa: Cubism!” Or,
“Pre-Raphaelites!” Or something.
“I guess so,” she says. “So much electronics.”
People flew her places by private jet. She
remembers a New Year’s Eve in St Barts,
dining aboard the yacht of the casino magnate
Steve Wynn, with an art collector and a
famous Canadian singer who made piles of
money crooning for Russian oligarchs. Wynn
himself had a large art collection but he had
steadily lost his vision and could no longer
look at it, she says. Across the water she could
see Roman Abramovich’s gigantic yacht.
“I think like, ‘I’m from communist Poland,’”
Pilat says. “These are moments.”
She has been to Richard Branson’s island
too, which was lovely, and gave her a chance
to ask if she might do some painting at Virgin
Galactic, though she’s more of a city person
really. “Wonderful. Very grateful. Beautiful,”
she says. In these retreats, “I’m always the
poorest person in the room,” she says.
Not all her art residencies were a roaring
success. John Krafcik, the former head of
Google’s self-driving car programme, agreed
to let her set up in the company’s workshops,
where she attempted to paint the LiDAR, the
sonar system that allows autonomous vehicles
to map their surroundings. After painting so
many ancient machines, it was her first shot
at a new piece of technology. “I was stressed
out,” she says.
New technology is harder to capture, she
says. It’s like “when you think of portraiture,
when you paint old people, it’s much more
interesting”. This was like painting a teenager.
“It came out hostile.”
Does that matter? Aren’t you supposed to
go where it takes you, as an artist?
“Well, it matters for me in the sense that...
For practical reasons, I have relationships with
these companies and they’re not going to
open their doors to me if I start portraying
their machines as, like...”
Terrifying?
“Terrifying, right. That’s [a] bad business
plan.” She likes to quote, at moments like this,
from a speech Teddy Roosevelt gave at the
Sorbonne, in 1910, arguing that “it is not the
critic who counts... The credit belongs to the
man who is actually in the arena, whose face
is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”
Those men, in her view, are the tech bros
of Silicon Valley. “These are the men in the
arena,” she says. “It’s very sexy to criticise
tech companies right now.”
While you’re waiting for your Amazon
package to arrive.
“Exactly.”
So what did you say to Google? Were
they understanding, about you not finishing
the painting?
“Yeah. I just didn’t get paid,” she laughs.
“That’s another reason I also have these
relationships with companies... I never ask
for anything.”
People sometimes think that she’s working
for the companies, as a sort of in-house
propagandist. She is not, she says. If she
has a master, it is the technology they
are making.
“I work for the machine,” she says.
So if Elon Musk asked you over, you
wouldn’t be at all interested in painting him?
“Elon Musk, no,” she says. “His technology,
yes. Very much so, yeah.”
It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement, in
her view. The tech firms have a “very male
culture. [So they] like having a woman there.
Fun, right?” she says. They are not anti-
women, in her opinion. “They’re like, geeky
guys. They want women!”
She thinks it calms everyone down, to have
an artist in the building. “They’re wonderful,
lovely tech geeks. They have no idea what’s
going on in the culture. So they’re like, ‘Wow.’ ”
To get in the door at these places, she
relies on personal introductions, via her
now formidable network of tech contacts.
The head of one of America’s largest chip
manufacturers, a friend of hers, had an
executive under him who went to work for
Boston Dynamics. Now that she works with
Spot, or for Spot, as I suppose she would
say, the company’s robotic dog is like acalling card. She opens doors, literally and
metaphorically speaking.
“You can meet anyone pretty much, with
Spot,” she says. “You will witness this outside.
I’ve really made a lot of connections, and she’s
been just very good for me.”
We step out along the corridor, the dog
clanking along ahead of us. While we wait
for the lift, Spot lies down. “She tries to be as
human as possible, so laziness is a true human
trait,” Pilat says.
Out on the pavement, Spot is received
like a celebrity. Everybody starts filming.
Motorists, driving past us are filming out of
the window. By the river, two men from the
parks department follow us, smiling at Pilat
sheepishly until she says, “All right, very
quickly, give me your phone.” They rush over
to Spot and crouch beside her, for the picture.
On the way back to her studio, she lets
me drive Spot down the corridor. She’s very
responsive. You feel rather powerful, sending
her tramping along ahead of you.
It’s great to go to parties with Spot, Pilat
says. They get a lot of invitations, as you can
imagine. “I can get into character and be
a little bit like, ‘Oh, this is a young, aspiring
artist. She has her own body of work. It’s not so
good. It’s like, abstract. It’s OK. She’s trying.’
So I can, in a sense, pitch my work without
feeling like I’m pitching myself... So... it’s not
self-promotion. It gives me, like, an angle.”
Has Spot made any sales?
“Yeah! She’s sold work.”
Back in the studio she takes my phone and
snaps a photograph of me with Spot. I don’t
normally do this; it feels unprofessional. But
I can’t quite help myself.
Then, she hits a few buttons on the control
pad and Spot lies down and rolls over beneath
one of her paintings. “I think this is just so
innocent,” Pilat says, nodding at the canvas.
“There’s so much integrity in this work.”
I ask her how she does the painting with
Spot; if she has a plan, at the beginning. She
does, “but then I try to think, ‘OK, maybe
there’s something more interesting coming.’ ”
She frowns. “I don’t like the yellow,” she
says, nodding at some yellow marks, at either
end of the canvass. “I put the yellow there,
I wish I didn’t. I really hate it, actually.”
Can’t you paint over it? You’re the artist,
I say. And then, of course, I wonder if I should
be talking to the dog.
“Without the yellow it would be stronger,”
she says, making up her mind. “I still
have to have a little rendezvous with
Basia. A powwow.”
If you were to see them painting, “We are
like, sweating,” she says, laughing. They work
together, woman and robot dog, straining
every sinew and piston. “We are! It’s like
really serious, like a kid, like, ‘Oh my god!
Look at this! Like, a straight line! Amazing!’ ” nSPOT IS GREETED LIKE A
CELEBRITY. MOTORISTS
DRIVE PAST FILMING US
OUT OF THE WINDOW