Art

Writing

Into the AI Vortex: The Production of Cultural Derivative Goo
Sar Conference 2023
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Diffusion Models, Computation, Art Theory, SAR Conference 2023

In his 1986 book The Engines of Creation, the nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler provoked with a thought experiment: if self-replicating technology exponentially grows, it will eventually leave its total environment of resources, required for production, as one large “gray goo.” Hence, coined as the Gray Goo scenario. This presentation argues that the field of AI cultural production, or AI Art, might approach a similar scenario. In the sense that, large scale AI models — DALLE-2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and so on — trained on gigantic datasets (e.g., 5.85 billion image-text pairs) produce a large combinatorial space; and, conversely, that aesthetic differentiation becomes difficult when the complex mixing of styles and content lead to derivative “goo” with saturated similarity.

THE AUTOMATON AND THE SILICON CAVE II: Engineering Presence
Kunstakedemiet Trondheim
Keywords: Artificial General Intelligence, Education, Computation, Art Theory, Synthetic Phenomenology, Transcendental Computationalism

The title above imaginatively projects the mis-en-scène of a Platonic blockbuster: a parable of a science-fictional character stuck between the illusions of the senses and the idealities of the mind. To a certain extent this is the case, but only to provoke a philosophical backtracking of our present digital computational paradigm. The title sets a narrative of computation departing into two directions: in the first the automaton descends deeper into the cave as preconceptual and pre-apperceptive intelligence, to the obscurity of the causal-mechanistic fabric that constitutes a perceptible world. And second, the automaton ascends outside the cave, to the -possibly even more obscure- logical-inferential space of thought.

POST-SUBLIME: New Sensibilities for the Formless
Kunstakedemiet Trondheim
Keywords: Education, Computation, Art Theory, Synthetic Phenomenology, The Incomputable, Sublime, GAN's, Neural Networks, Functional Imagination, Latent Space Aesthetics

In its convoluted history the sublime has endured disputable interpretations and appearances, but its general agreement converges to some-Thing that cannot be presented? An adequate response to this creative predicament emerges from the words of Lyotard: when there is something that is not presentable, you have to make presentation suffer. In this module we contort the concept of the sublime, to ponder upon the question: how do we render that which is unpresentable and unrepresentable, sensible? We will confront Kant’s statement that the sublime experience cannot precipitate by something that is man-made, and argue to the contrary that in our technological age, the synthesis of nature and technology has created a new aesthetic tradition of the post-sublime. Post- not in the sense something ceases to exist, but as in the words of Ulrich Beck “as a marker of our helplessness, the intellectual equivalent of a blind man’s stick probing in the dark”. Parallel to the reading and discussion of the texts we will look at examples from films, games and algorithms to illuminate the hypothesis. >> read further

ALGORITHMIC BEHAVIOUR UNDER THE SPELL OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM (Episode 1)
Meta.Morf 2020 Catalalogue
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Critical Theory, Algorithms

The difference between the ‘old days’ of media cultivation by television and the omni-presence of social media, is that “television was crafted as a machinery of regulation, subjection, and supervision by its "destructive capture of attention and desire”. What we see now are blatant coercions that exert extreme behavioural manipulations on its users. It is as Deleuze anticipates, that ‘control societies’ are hyper-industrialised societies and would give birth to an ‘art of control’. This form of holistic social engineering can only lead to a totalitarian system of traits we already see rising above the horizon. We should ask ourselves, if the printing press propelled the Reformation, the radio Fascist ideologies and television American Imperialism, what kind of regime will emerge from this generation of (badly designed) technologies? >> read further

A DELEUZIAN BLOB: ENGINEERING VENTRILOQUIST GEOMETRY (Episode 1)
DEFAULT SETTINGS OF PHILOSOPHY
Keywords: Toy Aesthetics, Dynamical Geometry, theatre of philosophy, movement

This is the first post in what you could call a series. A series that emerges out of the chronology of thinking itself, not as a chronology of thoughts. These are distinct as the latter stratifies an order for coherence, the former is the articulations of a stream of thoughts, at best ideas, dramatized and concatenated as a theoretical repository for my artistic practice. Before unleashing a cacophonous plenum of ideas, methods and confusions, we need to adjust some settings of the software. It is indeed software, but open source, as we will access the sequences of thoughts that eventually present the customized shape of our first concept: the Blob. >> read further

A DELEUZIAN BLOB: ENGINEERING VENTRILOQUIST GEOMETRY (Episode 2)
INTUITION from TOP-VIEW
Keywords: Perspective, Point of View, Laruelle

The first scene we encounter is our default position. A scene devoid of objects, ‘the empty space of pure understanding’ but surrounded by myriad figurative and probabilistic givens. Seducing the designer, engineer or builder (of thought) to fill in the emptiness with abstractions: “We can never represent to ourselves the absence of space, though we can quite well think it as empty of objects” It is a gradual movement of a geometric method toward the engineering of concepts, the building of worlds. >> read further

A DELEUZIAN BLOB: ENGINEERING VENTRILOQUIST GEOMETRY (Episode 3)
VENTRILOQUIST PHILOSOPHY: A PUPPET WITHOUT A MASTER
Keywords: Non-Philosophy, artist/philosopher , affect-percept-concept

Isn’t it Plato that performs the first philosophical ventriloquist act, when he speaks not of but (through)out the executed Socrates, the Father of Western philosophy? >> read further

META.MORF 2024 – [up]LOADED BODIES
Trondheim, Norway / Rotterdam, The Netherlands

April - October 2024

AI Lunch @V2
Online

September 26, 1PM

Sonar 2023 | (Prelude)The Automaton and the Silicon Cave
Barcelona, Spain

June 15 - June 18 2023