chron.illogical

A mixed media installation

Tucked away in a dimly lit cave, the spectator is tantalized with the projected shadows and sounds of a nonlinear and topological history of humanity. A meta-festo manifested with the aid of artificial intelligence echoes through the chamber as animations made using similar technologies dance along the wall. Curated books reflecting inspired topics sit nearby. The projected imagery slowly morphs into quasi-apocalyptic scenes of an illogical future.

In Chron.illogical, I’m drawing inspiration from classical allegories and ecology to propose alternative empathies in an attempt to remind the spectator of the relations between objects (natural and artificial). My use of a reflective surface might nudge the spectator towards reconsidering their place in the historically human-first misprojections upon their exit.

The work employs an assemblage of ‘analog’ collaged media and ‘new media’. The depiction of natural and artificial scenes with these mediums allows me to ponder what the future of epistemology will entail as the hybridity of man and machine becomes commonplace in the creative and learning processes. The meta-festo speaks to similar points. My choice to use a circular projection surface points towards its archetypal symbolism of cyclical renewal, decay and timelessness through the evolution of mind, matter and meaning. The surface's blank white slate and irregular edges form a mountain-top-esque platform to project these ideas.

Documentation

The animations were made with the aid of Disco Diffusion, which is an algorithm and prompt-based machine learning process. The meta-festo was engendered using a similar machine learning technology, OpenAI. Through this process, the text was trained on a few different manifestos from the art history canon and then developed further with Runway ML.

Three voices were digitalized and mixed together afterwards.

00:00 / 07:40

Within my chosen (found object) collage materials lie their embedded histories. Up until postmodernity, the standard epistemology surrounding 'our place in the world' was based on outdated dogmas that were printed into reference books and encyclopedias. A human-at-the-top mythology came to be. Hundreds of years of imprinting and perspective-shaping came to pass. The stratification of species throughout time parallels the arbitrary values placed on the resources and minerals that constitute the carbon-based fibers of the projection summit's collages, the summit itself and the projector’s silicon motherboards.

Humans seem to be the culprit-victim of their own misunderstandings of value structures they've placed on objects (including species, materials and world-views) and how they relate in an environment. With these blank stones, I'd say the time is Now to re-learn of our entangled physicality from the materials and technologies we have developed. Emerging technologies and machines, such as A.I, are learning from the human fallibility found within our obsolete 'human-first' doctrines… So, how might the synthesis of art-making and A.I technologies help re-project our understanding of an ecologically-minded chronology?

Could we, ironically, learn about ourselves from the machines we are training?