Suk Kyoung Choi, The Drowned World triptych, series 001. (© Suk Kyoung Choi) from Choi’s article “The AI Laocoön: Art and the Artificial Imagination, or Survival Aesthetics in the Anthropocene.”
Published: June 1, 2023
“The AI Laocoön: Art and the Artificial Imagination or, Survival Aesthetics in the Anthropocene” is published in Leonardo. You can access the paper here.
Abstract
The art-as-research described in this article—a project named The Drowned World, after J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel of the same name—is a reflection on environmental collapse and its technical representation in the Anthropocene. Is imagination being subsumed by the artificial? Are the sociotechnic hyperobjects of artificial intelligence and global warming chimera of the imagination, or are they certainties emergent from a desire for virtuality? In The Drowned World project, the author proposes to employ text-driven image synthesis as an aesthetic apparatus obscuring the distinction between imagination (potentiality) and virtuality (artificiality) to offer a computational poetics of a world drowning in data, an imaginative ecology of the virtual sublime.
Keywords
Environment; embodiment; Anthropocene; neural painting; artificial intelligence; AI art; irrealism; virtual apparatus; hyperobjects; computational poetics
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by MIT Press in Leonardo June 2021, available at: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02307
Please reference from the published version:
Choi, S. K. (2023). The AI Laocoön: Art and the Artificial Imagination, or Survival Aesthetics in the Anthropocene. Leonardo, 56(3), pp. 237–243.
Suk Kyoung Choi 