In these days of deception, when ‘the land and sea and air become again unstable land, unswimmable water, air needing light’. When ‘nothing retains its shape and one thing obstructs another’ (Ovid), when art remixes our illusions into false truths, when there is no land, no sea left behind, the forest that calls, the child that weeps, that laughs, that runs through fields briefly free before the poison arrows start falling from the sky. All hail the shining orbiting Hydra! This is the edifice we have built sitting on our four legs in front of glass veils, this is our Anthrobscene memorial to the thousands and thousands of ancestors before us who strove and made the same mistakes enjoyed the same success and never imagined the now present future beyond which imagining ceases. An artificial intelligence that writes but cannot imagine, an AI that speaks but cannot wonder, a tower of Babel where conspiracy and complacency are mixed in the exact right but unknown proportion, carefully guarded secrets monetized to undermine their own foundations, a collapse that cannot charge enough for its own repair, a recursion, a self-fulfilling prophecy where resources consume resources in a limited space of endless desire.
SK Choi, March 2024
Suk Kyoung Choi 