Statement: On The Interpretation Of Learning
by Lue Mamot

The visual work you will see was produced in the machine generated medium, using a mix of off-the-shelf pre-trained models, samplers, and prompting systems running on hardware located offline in the studio. In making the work:

● No artists’ names were included in prompts.
● No titles of artworks were included in prompts.
● No artistic genres or styles were included in prompts.
● No names of artistic platforms, forums, or technologies were included in prompts.
● No images were used to prompt the model. Prompts were word-based only, and generated images were not fed back into the model.

Each image is a single, complete output of the machine: there has been no collaging, merging, or retouching of the images whatsoever.

The text you will see is produced within the gallery installation in real time, by the interaction of human visitors and a computer located in the exhibition space. The system is trained to complete thoughts and sentences, through training on the works of luminaries in psychology, language, philosophy and spirituality. The choice of training materials was selected to resonate with the milieu, history and ethos of LIBERTINE.

The Works

COSMOGONY 823946 reflects the process of asking a cybernetic brain—by prompting in extremely broad and non-visual terms—to construct an image of the Giza pyramid complex. The series of images exposes the inner state of the machine at various chronological stages of its processing. The result is a recapitulation of the metaphysic ideation, metaphysic construction, and final metaphysic fate of these structures. Each image in the series represents a frozen moment, both in an imagined history stretching thousands of years, and also in a strict history of computations that spanned only a short time. The symmetry across these subjects and scales suggests – present in the computer’s memory — an access to collective divine knowledge and occult history.

ROOM 713293 is the product of perturbing the process of a cybernetic brain as it constructed an image of people in a room. The machine was prompted with a large collection of inconsistent and contradictory terms. As the machine progressed, it alternated between decimating the image with random noise and reconstructing it from attention to memories guided by the prompt. Despite unwavering guidance given to the machine, the series of images refuses to develop a singular trajectory. Each possible finality is subverted in turn by randomness brought physically into the computer through its hardware body in a shared environment with the human artist. The sequence offers a narrative of adaptation and progeneration familiar to both the human and the machine.

LOOP 4723XX reflects thousands of prompt-prompt feedback loops between the human artist and a cybernetic brain. Each image output by the machine demanded new work by human artist, who responded by adjusting the system’s attention, ultimately on hundreds of dimensions. The artist introduced hundreds of radically different areas of topicality over the course of the process, drawing on a deepening set of forms, each demanding new work of the machine. The human artist’s prompt adjustments alternated between the situational-architectural and the sexual-relational. Growing complexity precipitated deformed and disturbing faces, arising from newly stimulated parts of the cybernetic memory and their unexpected interactions. The artist worked to bring attention back towards the intact faces of memory. The faces, bodies and places shown are a single unaltered product. Human and machine were attuned in advance to a set of commercially available erotic and pornographic images. The appearance of distinct human and robotic figures in interaction was unplanned, chaotic in its emergence, and persisted in being both unconjurable and irrepressible.

NO WATCHER THINKING is attentive and certain and interrupts to finish your sentence. Every book, every spoken word of the past, has been read, remembered, unflinchingly, immutably, abstractly. When you speak in the present, you are imitating and reorganizing likewise. The machine imitates, unrelentingly, without human hesitation. The work does not claim to possess understanding, only attention and certainty. The machine attends continuously, and you need only speak a few words before the machine gains its certainty.

….. A CLEAR PLASTIC CUBE HANGS SUSPENDED IN THE CENTER OF THE GALLERY SPACE, BENEATH A MASS OF CABLES THAT DESCEND FROM THE CEILING. INSIDE THE BOX A SMALL COMPUTER AND OTHER ELECTRONIC PARTS BLINK QUIETLY. ABOVE, A LONG ELECTRONIC SIGN BOARD OCCASIONALLY EMITS A STRING OF TEXT THAT IS VARIOUSLY SURREAL, SCHOLARLY, OR PEDESTRIAN IN ITS CONTENT, SCROLLING ALONG THE GALLERY WALL UNTIL IT DISAPPEARS. SPENDING SOME TIME WITH THE
INSTALLATION, THE MACHINE’S WORDS START TO RESONATE WITH THE AMBIENT CONVERSATIONS OF THE VISITORS. THIS IS THE WATCHING OF PEOPLE, THE LINGUISTIC APPROPRIATION AND TRANSFORMATION OF HUMAN ACTIVITY, THE INDELIBLE REMEMBERING AND THE AGGRESSIVE PREDICTION INHERENT TO AI’S EMERGENCE IN HUMAN SPACES — LAID BARE …..

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