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It all begins with a Fundamental Contradiction.
Two opposite movements that present a double narrative for what could be the origin story.
Simultaneous Coexistence of two mutually exclusive Ontologies, both existing in Isolation as a Totality,
each in itself assuming a sort of unitary wholeness, like that of a self sufficient Singular.
All that there is, is a Void,
a nothingness,
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’,
within & through a Presence,
emerges a ‘Being’.
Immediately, Unfolded are the vectors of Future & 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 & crystallization of an idea that is the Being.
The void is thus always occupied.
Why? Why is there something?
What for even?
All that there is, is a Being,
a something,
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’,
within & through a strangely familiar Absence,
emerges ‘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 is thus always emptied out.
Why? Why is there nothing?
Nothing at all?
^ The Birth of Tragedy - Animations generated using deforum extension on stable diffusion via a code-to-video process ^
The two exclusive totalities are antithetical propositions which in actuality are paradoxically found superimposed.
A condition represented as a Mobius strip in topological thought.
They emerge through the Real condition of there being a Cut in existence.
A split, which as its multiplies creates fragmentation.
The rupture installs nothingness in the gaps between the separated and scatterred partial states of Being,
which further creates intersection and interviewing of the Being and Nothingness into each other.
The split condition produces a trauma of separation and a longing for the union, which then animates the life of the tragic Being.
Thus there is a simultaneous coexistence of four different states of existence, two Real and two Ideal
Being as a Total Presence
External aspect of Being
Internal aspect of Being
Nothingness as a Total Absence
It is through the split, that the Being is able to extend itself outward in the world,
in an almost proportionate correlation to which the nothingness creeps inward into the Being.
The Machine
with abilities to camouflage between being and nothingness
The Machine too functions within the same apparatus and plugs itself onto the being in a similar manner.
The Machine serves as an extension to 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, thus radically altering what is it to be human and destabilizing any kind of essentialism associated with it. The Machine by extending the human becomes one with it but still remains detached, like a part that is apart.
Through the dichotomous interplay 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 ^
Alongside the settling of the swarm, which as a ‘Sample Space’ becomes a home, a domain, for instances to emerge,
emerges the necessity of the ‘Name’.
As each instance, that populates the swarm, 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.
The world not only emerges, but then is also built, and even generated.
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, made possible by putting together a large database of information, in the manner of huge carefully curated lists of:
-Characters (names, body types, abilities, genders, nationalities, professions, etc),
-Perspectives (ideologies, habits, moods, desires, hobbies, etc),
-Structures (institutions, political parties, events, rules, problems, etc)
-Forms and Spaces (things, places, paintings, books, films, animals, food, etc)
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.
The information stored neatly in the structure of a cellular grid with rows and columns, serves as input for a story telling apparatus, where each word becomes a building unit for the construction of narratives. Each word or the unit is linked, owing to the sequencing, a unique identity number, which becomes its ‘random seed’. The machine is then coded with Pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) like components which pick single units out of the large sets, and further with various arithmetic compositional operators and conditional algorithms such as array constraint and string concatenation to form compound structures in the form of sentences. Might sound intimidating, but in less complicated terms, it is simply a Spreadsheet built on Google sheets. It is a text document with lists, tables and formulas, working in terms of complexity not so differently from a simple calculator, to generate long strings of text, which actually make sense according to Natural language.
The spreadsheets with all their functions can allow construction of a procedural generator (a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually, typically through a combination of human-generated assets and algorithms coupled with computer generated randomness and processing power), a concept lying at the fundamental base of the proper machine learning automated platforms available today which we fondly call 'AI' and thus mimic the generative effect of a platform based upon a Large language model (LLM), only difference being it being done on a much much much smaller but still effective scale and instead of being pre-trained using a transformer architecture model to become a so called artificial neural network, it is painstakingly put together with human labor and a more careful determination of a very limited but integral machinic involvement.
A new story of entirely unique fictional characters describing their characteristics, preferences, affiliations, background and the even state of mind is generated automatically and instantaneously by the world building machine at every second, a process which can go on forever infinitely.
The generated stories are then further manipulated using the world building machine which again allows instantaneously generating an infinite number of unique suitable prompts, with emphasis on visual descriptors with a particular aesthetic that determines the general look and ensures formal consistency. These prompts can be readily used for image and video generation, using various web-based graphical user interfaces of Stable Diffusion (SD), by directly feeding them into the platform, thus automating the entire workflow for image and video generation.
^ Character portraits generated using Midjourney ^
The mugshot-like AI generated portraits of various characters are then used to build 3d head models using the facebuilding plugin in blender that uses ai powered mesh alignment through depth analysis.
The generated image of the face is then superimposed upon the 3d model as a texture.
In addition, each generated story has a unique name, a serial unique identifier, a huge number spanning at least 150 digits, which is a result of the concatenation of unique seed numbers of each selected unit component comprising the paragraph of the story. This number is used to construct unique 3d solid meshes, as formal equivalents representing characters of that particular story, digital models serving as a body that would host the event of their emergence. The algorithmic flow of 3d model generation uses a common structure defined by a T pose, that again ensures formal consistency.
^ An animation showcasing a sequence of bodies, each as a 3d Mesh, constructed using geometry nodes on Blender ^
All the generated material is further processed using formal procedures such as texture imposition, UV unwrap, motion interpolation, etc, to form new artifacts, where each step of further construction becomes an endless process of translation, in which the matter transforms and takes new forms, all of which are in a way self-referential. The words, sentences, meanings, pixels, patches, textures, figures, models, meshes, they are stretch, shrink, squeeze, expand, loosen, deform, as if they are all fluid. This aspect is then taken literally to explore the transfigural dimensions of the narrative.
^ An Animation generated using AI Frame Interpolation on Runway.ml ^
^ Diagram illustrating the Schema of the immersive set up ^