The Cave and AI
The Drowned World: The Anthropocene in four movements
(Four ballads for Ballard)
The songs come to me in waking dreams, turning captures of my environment into messages in a digital bottle, interventions on future histories, containments of some measure of present sanity. This texture, this building, these strange people.
Distorted affect, data captured and manipulated, layered palimpsests which I then carve into with paint, layering as taking away, taking away as layering, an Anthropocene palette annotated and appended until the words of the poet are lost in the noise and the noise becomes silence becomes poetry.
The Anthropocene is a dangerous place – I can only use small scraps of paper torn from floating lampposts, the few remaining images taken on a run for food, work fast, work cheap, foraging memory for imagination. The art has to float on small boats we make from garbage, a making of fragments from fragments, Schwitters rolls over in his watery grave, and the galleries are deep in the radioactive ocean. No need. There is little left.
I spend my final days recording this madness. Are there any others left? Will they cluster on the shore of some faraway reserve, curating notes from the sea, thinking “how curious”?
Figure 1. “A dystopian city long since vanished, the steel-supported buildings of the central commercial and financial districts had survived the encroaching flood waters.” Stable Diffusion and original oil drawing composite image.
Description
The work presented derives from J. G. Ballard’s dystopian climate novel The Drowned World (1962), which transpires in a possible future where cataclysmic environmental change resulting from unstable solar activity has resulted in reversion of the global climate back to conditions similar to the Triassic Period, in the course of a single generation. Central to the novel is the suggestion that our evolution in geological time is embodied in consciousness and intimately tied to the environment, a notion called ‘neuronic time’. The few remaining humans of Ballard’s near future slowly lose touch with contemporary context and are drawn into an increasingly dreamlike world of the ancient past.
Today we are awash in another kind of paradigm shift. The structuring and mediation of information by computational entities accepted as “artificially intelligent” is opaquely and rapidly altering the information environment in which we exist. Sharing of ideas has become the mediation of information by elite structures of control. We are drifting into another kind of drowned world, the virtual dream-realm of the AI Anthropocene.
In The Cave and AI, I extend Ballard’s metaphor of embodied dreamtime toward an investigation of this emerging environment. We have built machines that dream. How will this algorithmic dreaming affect our own?
In this work, I derive generative AI image prompts from Ballard’s novel in a ‘dehumanization’ of the text eliminating character and viewpoint to arrive at a disembodied pre-description of cybernetic dream worlds to come. The generated images are used to provide a base for a stratifying palimpsest of imagery that I associate with the layering of our Anthropocene sociotechnical culture, scraping away layers to find what lies beneath, only to realize the scraping is itself a layering, and that we are already caught up in the dream, painting on walls to a future that guides the hand.
Methods
The animation investigates the phenomenology of discrete temporal parameter changes on aesthetic perception. Starting from collages made by painting over computationally processed prints of original oil-on-paper drawings and photographs, I build physical layers of text-to-image and image-to-image generative AI where one change affects another in often unpredictable ways. Thus, a co-creative Open Work structure (Eco, 1989) that also acknowledges the chance operations of John Cage (1973) emerges and evolves. The theme explores metaphors of a world drowning in the twin environments of climate change and information deluge.
The original photos were treated with these lines from Ballard, “a dystopian city long since vanished, the steel-supported buildings of the central commercial and financial districts had survived the encroaching flood waters.” This set the foundation for the piece, an immanent prelude.
Figure 2. One of the original photos. How deep is the sky?
Figure 3. An early quick image-to-image study derived from the Fig. 2 source photo. At this stage parameters are chosen for their emotional affect, an exploration of dystopian latent space in anticipation of serendipitous resonance with the themes of the work. I don’t use parameter grids initially. These images are printed out for drawing over manually. Physical actions, sounds, and feelings are prioritized in this practice.
Figure 4. Another image-to-image study which became central to the third movement of the work.
Bio
Suk Kyoung Choi is a Korean Canadian artist and interdisciplinary researcher working in Vancouver, Canada. Her work blends processes drawn from painting, drawing, and collage with mediation through technologies of artificial intelligence. Choi’s painting process explores the embodied origins of visual metaphor to understand the nature of transformation between experience and information.
Suk Kyoung received a BFA with Honours from the Alberta University of the Arts and an MA and PhD from Simon Fraser University. Choi’s thesis, Losing Touch: A comparative phenomenology of creative process in traditional and neural painting, explores what art becomes in the age of artificial intelligence and what is lost and gained when human touch transforms into data. The goal of her research is to question and model how subjectivity is mediated in our developing creative relationship with intelligent machines.
As an artist, Suk Kyoung seeks to expose the cultural assumptions and qualia that emerge when quantitative technologies attempt to model and reflect upon a diversity of human conditions and motivations.
References
Ballard, J. G. (2014). The Drowned World. London: Fourth Estate. (Original work published 1962)
Cage, J. (1973). Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press. (Original work published 1961)
Choi, SK. (2018). Guess, check and fix: A phenomenology of improvisation in “neural” painting. Digital Creativity, 29(1), 96–114. doi:10.1080/14626268.2018.1423995
Choi, SK. (2021). What happened to the subject? Mediated anticipation in neural painting. Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 19(3) (Themed Issue: “On Modes of Participation”), 301–320. doi:10.1386/tear_00071_1
Dietrich, D. (1993). The Collages of Kurt Schwitters: Tradition and Innovation. Cambridge University Press.
Eco, Umberto. (1989). The Open Work. Anna Cancogni (Trans.) Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Zylinska, Joanna. (2017). Nonhuman Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.