Some examples from my Art of the Machine series. In this series I explore the AI text-to-image transformation of extended technical poetics drawn from post-phenomenological texts and their historical antecedents such as Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine. In this series I wish to expose the mind of an emerging technical intelligence, both fragile and irresistible.
Text-to-image synthesis puts the artist into a complicit existential relation. They become a part of the AI apparatus, a functionary component in an interaction responding to ambiguous mappings between input and output. A computationally mediated expression and reflection, a cybernetic forest composed of thousands of twisting wires, wound throughout the rusted skeletal framework of overgrown metaphors of machines, plumbing, and arteries.
One must not be distracted by the apparent “reality” of these visualizations. They are in fact images of compounded ambiguity, unstable texts of high connectivity, artefacts of algorithmic behavior reflecting viewpointed intention, shared, modified, monetized, and distributed. Put in some coins, out comes fresh reality.
A machine made from photographs, drawings, and plans of old machinery from the dawn of the industrial age, a forgotten history of technical mythology read in a book somewhere in the lost library of Mistville. AI txt2img places us in a state of ambiguous anticipation where we know it’s not believable, but it looks believable. A lie that makes us realize the truth, where the machines chip away everything that looks like a human, revealing the pure light within.
Container schemas trap beliefs. “The” image transforms to “an” image, when perceiver curation is resonance with a particular aesthetic narrative — an ongoing process of becoming revealed. The artist may choose one iteration, but that singular representative is really a somehow-favoured node of a path, initiating a fork in the navigation of latent space.
Suk Kyoung Choi 