Georgy Ègor Kraft: 1 & ∞
Artist(s):
Title:
- 1 & ∞
Exhibition:
Medium:
- Conceptual Art
Category:
Artist Statement:
Joseph Kossuth’s ‘One & Three Chairs’ is the most textbook – introductory – example to conceptual art, as it touches upon a number of characteristics definitive of conceptual art. Emphasising the concept above all other perceptual content, it dematerialises art itself as a practice.
In 1 & ∞ Initial images of chairs were generated using the text- to-image Ai model, based on the prompt: ’a single chair on a plain background’. This dataset, of photo-realistic images of a wide variety of chairs, was then used to train the Stable Diffusion model again, extending its knowledge capacity of what ’a chair on a plain background’ can look like. This process of re-training the model on its own generated imagery was repeated again and again. Until, at the 6th iteration, instead of photo-realistic images of chairs, as seen in the initial step, the model produced colourful digital noise in which any resemblance to the represented subject –a chair, would fade completely.
In another iconic conceptual sound artwork, ’I am sitting in a room,’ the author Alvin Lucier is recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room, re-recording it. Eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the characteristic resonant frequencies of the room itself.
In data science, the phenomena of AI feeding into AI is often referred to as data-cannibalism. Through the necessity to augment datasets and due to AI image and data generation’s increasing and insidious prevalence, more and more new Ai systems will be trained on synthetic datasets, produced by generative Ai models, thus posing ontological challenges and poisoning future datasets and epistemic accuracy of those models. Via such feedback loops within echo chambers of auto-generated and consumed data, the domain ontology of a subject and its visual representation decay into non-figurative abstraction. . . at least so for a human eye.
