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Within the contemporary context of rapid unprecedented technological advancements, marked by the arrival of the Cambrian explosion of Artificial Intelligence, the Machine (which had extended the human in wondrous ways, allowing command, by effect of convenience and efficiency, while also simultaneously penetrating and inhabiting the innermost crevices of its fragmented and alienated existence) having evolved from mechanization, digitisation and computation, now begins to finally and full-fledgedly embrace the realm of Automation. No longer just an assisting tool, but the Machine becomes the Master, a relatively self-operating control mechanism, governing almost everything, resulting in a Life which is no longer lived, but having become mere aggregated data, further gathered and fed to algorithms which constantly synthesize / generate new realities, redefining choices, behavior, and imagination, thus reducing the human to an automaton. Artificial Intelligence seems to offer many potentially liberating opportunities for production of empowering narratives and subjectivities, as it holds the power to challenge and go beyond all too narrow humanistic perspectives and necessities, by effectively decentering & throwing away to the margins, the enlightened narcissistic human ego subject, its anthropocentric compositional lens, and assumed authoritative central status, moving towards a supposedly objective truth that the generative method provides. But again, what seems as a utopian vision now, in actuality, remains a false horizon, as the machine, far from being a neutral powerful tool, in a socially divided and unequal capitalist neo-feudalist society, remains a victim itself, as it only favors the ideologies of corporations and oligarchs. In such a case, art too, in favor of a single universal pseudo-culture of consumption and exploitation is not a reflection of knowledge systems, socio-political struggles, subcultural representation, or a catalyst of change, but rather a means of aestheticizing the system's agenda and trends. Instead of critical art, the system promotes profitable entertainment without social symbolism, reflections, or signs of activism. Therefore, alongside merely innovating within the given framework, interrogating epistemological lenses and advocating cultural norms, codes and forms, what is required more than ever is an active intervention with the tools, the modes and means of production as well. Not a limited participation that subscribes itself to the existing available means that follow the same deterministic hegemonic logic, but a radically new method that serves as a prototype for further emerging Microtopias.
All that is Solid melts into the Air, is a world building exercise that constructs a critical narrative mirroring the spectacle and horrors of such a situation where enjoyment is promised, but within an ethos of fear and panic, where one is provoked to resist decoupling of intelligence from an empathetic consciousness, and rethink what it is to be human?
The Narrative
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There is nothing but just a Void, from which it all begins.
Something somehow emerges out of Nothing.
Absence, as it greets the newly emerged Presence out there,
there is an immediate rupture.
In the face of ‘Nothingness’ of the Absence,
within & through what is understood as Presence, emerges a ‘Being’.
Immediately, Unfolded are the vectors of Future and Past from its Position, bolting outrageously in their respective directions away from the Present.
Automatically, the endless expanse of smooth continuous space shatters, materializing into a multitude of Fragmentations and Striations.
The infinite vacuum is all of a sudden introduced with an air injected with a strange idea of a necessary finitude, allowing incubation, solidification and crystallization of an idea that is the Being.
The void is thus always completely occupied.
Something somehow emerges out of Nothing.
Absence, as it greets the newly emerged Presence out there,
there is an immediate rupture.
In the face of ‘Nothingness’ of the Absence,
within & through what is understood as Presence, emerges a ‘Being’.
Immediately, Unfolded are the vectors of Future and Past from its Position, bolting outrageously in their respective directions away from the Present.
Automatically, the endless expanse of smooth continuous space shatters, materializing into a multitude of Fragmentations and Striations.
The infinite vacuum is all of a sudden introduced with an air injected with a strange idea of a necessary finitude, allowing incubation, solidification and crystallization of an idea that is the Being.
The void is thus always completely occupied.
There is something such as a Being,
from which it all begins.
Nothing somehow emerges within Something.
Presence, as it greets the newly emerged Absence within,
there is an immediate rupture.
In the face of ‘Being’ of the Presence,
within & through a strangely familiar Absence, emerges a ‘Nothingness’.
Immediately folded back are the vectors of Future and Past from their flight, being summoned for a return towards the Singularity of the Present.
Automatically, the Fragmentations & Striations begin to crumble down, letting the smooth space creep back in & reclaim its ultimate unity.
The finitude all of a sudden witnesses a haunting silence inscribed with a contingency of infinity, opening up, becoming anxious and restless confronting the material that is the Nothingness.
The Being was completely Empty.
Nothing somehow emerges within Something.
Presence, as it greets the newly emerged Absence within,
there is an immediate rupture.
In the face of ‘Being’ of the Presence,
within & through a strangely familiar Absence, emerges a ‘Nothingness’.
Immediately folded back are the vectors of Future and Past from their flight, being summoned for a return towards the Singularity of the Present.
Automatically, the Fragmentations & Striations begin to crumble down, letting the smooth space creep back in & reclaim its ultimate unity.
The finitude all of a sudden witnesses a haunting silence inscribed with a contingency of infinity, opening up, becoming anxious and restless confronting the material that is the Nothingness.
The Being was completely Empty.
^ Birth of the World - Animations generated using deforum extension on stable diffusion via a code-to-video process ^
Through the dichotomous relationship between Being and Nothingness, as they are continuously becoming each other,
emerges a terrain, a dynamic landscape, alluding a swarm of blobs and splatters, rendered by a conglomeration of multiplicitous kinetic forms,
that move under the determination of a Dialectical Existence,
and pertaining to their fundamental structural arrangement and position, all set into motion by further secondary antagonistic dichotomies,
such as Identity and Difference, Figure and Ground, Center and Periphery, Totality and Assemblage, Homogeneity and Heterogeneity, Order and Chaos, Harmony and Dissonance, Arboreal and Rhizomatic, and so on.
^ The swarm - images generated using deforum extension on stable diffusion via a text-to-image process ^
The swarm as a ‘Sample Space’ becomes a home, a domain, for instances, occurences and sequences to emerge, where each of them is a vector tagged with a floating random seed number that asigns to them an identity which represents their unique difference within the totality of the set.
Furthermore, these individual instances, the cases or the numbers, they all have a unique formal equivalent, a mesh that serves as a body that would host the event of their emergence.
^ An animation showcasing a sequence of bodies, each as a 3d Mesh, constructed using geometry nodes on Blender ^
Just as the relationship between the Signifier and the Signified in a Sign, in Linguistics, is completely arbitrary,
the Name (the case or the seed number) and the Form (the mesh body), both have a precarious relation to each other, a connection that is held together merely by the inter-relationships within the infinite differential chain logic that is emergent through the multiplicity of forms.
Transformer models, basically the neural networks which are large encoder/decoder blocks, learn the context by tracking and processing such relationships in sequential data of the sample space, and by doing so seem to derive a Meaning.
The world building machine is essentially a mimesis of the contemporary culture production machine determined by generative processes. It is a story telling apparatus fed with a huge database of carefully curated lists of particular cases. The stored information serves as input, where each element becomes a building unit for the construction of narratives. The machine is further accompanied with Pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) components, and various arithmetic compositional operators and conditional algorithms such as array constraint and string concatenation to form something similar to a Large language model (LLM), only difference being it being done on a much smaller but still effective scale and instead of being pre-trained using a transformer architecture model to become an artificial neural network, it is painstakingly put together with human labour and a more careful determination of a very limited but integral machinic involvement.
In less complicated terms, it is simply a Spreadsheet built on Microsoft Excel, a text document with tables and formulas, working not so differently from a simple calculator.
As of now, the database contains about 1347 First names, 956 Surnames, 84 Genders, 82 Sexualities, 84 Classes, 312 Castes, 5 Races, 219 Nationalities, 415 Occupations, 285 Archetypes, 597 Formal Qualities, 101 Body Types, 273 Features, 485 Abilities, 746 Colours, 334 Eye Types, 513 Habits, 603 Hobbies, 776 Moods, 294 Desires, 418 Mottos, 493 Ideologies or Philosophies, 757 Political parties, 81 Religions, 164 Governmental forms, 787 Collectives, 999 Youtube channels, 1000 Instagram accounts, 378 Institutions, 142 Rules or Laws, 155 Punishments, 93 Rewards, 527 Systems, 744 Problems, 101 Disasters, 720 Events, 942 Adjectives, 719 Verbs Infinitives, 403 Verbs, 60 Time based Adverbs, 47 Prepositions, 683 Manner based Adverbs, 160 Relationship types, 559 Mundane objects, 221 Traded Commodities, 237 Objects of Curiosity, 1000 Brands, 1470 Foods, 495 Drinks, 549 Animals, 1132 Pets, 481 Businesses, 312 Materials, 1011 Stocks, 255 Mobile apps, 558 Games, 1001 Paintings, 259 Art Styles, 1798 Philosophers, 593 Books, 1000 Films, 172 Architectural elements, 745 Locations and 742 Cities / towns.
A completely new and unique story of an entirely new, pseudo fictional character and world, is generated automatically and instantaneously.
Characters generated using Midjourney
Animation generated using AI Frame Interpolation on Runway.ml
Characters generated using Disco Diffusion (DD), a Google Colab Notebook leveraging AI Image generating CLIP-Guided Diffusion technique:
Characters generated using Stable Diffusion (SD), a latent diffusion model (LDM), a kind of deep generative neural network, using text to image sampling script:
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