Hyejin Hannah Kum-Biocca, JinHong Kwon: AI: Artificial Interruption
Artist(s):
Title:
- AI: Artificial Interruption
Exhibition:
- SIGGRAPH Asia 2020: Untitled & Untied
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Summary
In Artificial Interruption, the cube, a digital abstraction interrupts the natural order. The seasons fold like boxes; we see time crystalize. AI slides open a door and leaks into a tightly networked sea of ice. Underneath the last mammal escapes and swims away with our past, coded in her genes.
Abstract
The artificial, a cube, a digital abstraction interrupts and breaks the natural order.
The AI builds into rectangles and cubes, abstract, perfect, but empty of life. The seasons fold like boxes into structures of gray, as we see time crystalize.
As the artificial interruption spreads fields and leaves shatter into ice cubes. Nature once fluid, splatters, then freezes.
The AI slides open a door and leaks into a tight, glacial surface of data cubes, a networked sea of ice. Under this sea sheet of networked ice, the last mammal escapes and swims away and with her, our past, coded in her genes.
Other Information:
Inspiration Behind the Project
AI, Artificial Interruption, is a visual story on the theme of the superimposition of the artificial on the natural, digital layers crusted on life in the post-AI era. As technology advances, we live with a complicated feeling of anxiety and longing for the past or anticipation and imagining of a future where the artificial and natural merge.
We imagined the interruption of the artificial in terms of the seasons. Whenever the season changes, we feel a break, an interruption that includes hope then a falling, such as falling petals and raindrops. As the seasonal cycle ends with the cold, this final interruption breaks into a sheet of ice representing both the new AI era’s vague edgy anxiety and the icy spread of the age of artificial intelligence.
The artificial interruption inevitably grows like a crystal form. The cold crystals of AI, like our anxiety, spread into a vast icy sheet, an unknown environment, a fourth wave industry. Like water changing to ice, this vast white plane represents the world’s intelligence taking a different form than the previous ones washing over the three industrial and post-industrial waves.
At the end, hope takes shape in an escaping mammal. Breaking free from the sea’s unfamiliar territory, the whale, a metaphoric vessel for our nature and genes swims away carrying our merged identity forward into a new space.
We think our role in the post-AI era is to provide the direction where artificial intelligence merges with our sea-based, biological, and evolutionary home embodied in this strong, free, and somehow motherly mammal floating out into space.