Unseen Futures: Homebook of Hallucinations video essay from Eternal Engine
"Meeting the possibilities of AI in the field of visual arts again directs us to the question: Are we hallucinating our reality?"
Artistic duo Eternal Engine (Jagoda Wójtowicz and Martix Navrot) produced this video essay condensing their approach to working with AI in their practice which they delivered as a skill share session for the other artist fellows during the fellowship. This stems from work the duo have been focussing on during the fellowship in developing a manifesto for their work together. Homebook of Hallucinations is the duo's contribution to the final part of the Unseen Futures Fellowship 2022-2023 edition.
Transcript:
Welcome in the homebook of hallucination
What is a hallucination ? Is it the state of transcendence ?
Hallucination for me is a state of transcendence, it often also exists in “breeding” - combining elements and images from reality in unexpected configurations.
What I associate with the art of AI a few years ago was the state of "transcending" perception, seeing what goes beyond the perspective of humanoid limitations. A dreamlike and fascinating image.
Meeting the possibilities of AI in the field of visual arts again directs us to the question:
Are we hallucinating our reality ?
Reality has never been so psychedelic. Accompanying the development of neural networks, global corporations monopolize the technology market, opening up a techno-pessimistic perspective of the future for us. Connected in a network thanks to technological devices, we can collectively hallucinate, dream, experience. In collective experience we cross the borders of our bodies and the surrounding matter seems to serve more and more what is physically absent.
Do we live in a simulation? It is like a psychedelic experience around me? Are we living on a bad trip? Eternal bad trip? Powered by the best graphics cards from Google Collab - Nvidia Tesla. Patterns of reality, soft as a carpet with a tiger backdoors of consciousness, holiday memories resold to a company that buys dreams to train. Each server is made of silicon, petroleum, aluminum. How can I create a new world on extracted materials, from drilled earth. But I wanna create a new world, I just don't know how to calculate it and where to store it.
Enhance, upscale, create, generate, hallucinate.
We watch the process slowly fade away, not that we're total technopessimists, our relationship with technology is love and hate. Is this the great automation?
The future job - prompt engineer - the only human actor in the great chain of hybrid creation.
Our methodology adopts a subversive reversal of the neural networks and turns to the imagination, the reality prompt, in order to break the override of the code of reality. We do not avoid using neural networks in our work or on a daily basis, we only want to be sure what the feed was like, where the servers are, what is the team of engineers, how many graphics cards are activated when using the network.
Feeding - Breeding - Blending - Generate