Model A: Adversaries, 2023, 3D printed sculpture with embedded media display and LCD display with dynamic video loop, 32 x 18 x 26 cm
Plinth acrylic and aluminium and gravel
From our standpoint in time, it's hard to imagine the function of this artifact but our archeologists believe it to be a fossilized artificial lifeform, created to manifest adversarial networks into a living being. Created from primarily from 4 anthropomorphic lab-grown homunculi with a common spinal chord and nervous system, which served as an engine for opposing and symmetrical desire-drives. From a central orfice a polymorphic computational fluid was secreted as a matrix to regulate the intermediate flows and interactions. At some point, through generation and discrimination, evolved into a conscious libidinal mass that eventually overloaded its components, leaving a spent husk engulfed in viscous data-excreta. Thus, this experiment was viewed as a failure, one of many endeavors to shift from generative AI to biological computation.
'Records from the Pre-History of Intelligence'
Model A: Adversaries proposes a world in which biological computation has replaced silicon-based devices. By materializing processes that are usually occulted in machine learning, such as Generative Adversarial Networks, the embodiment of the various forces that comprises layers of a neural network are made apparent to humanoid, chimeric forms. Translating computation to bodies also begs the question, what is the "juice" that runs through biological computers, I speculate that the nature of this energy would be some form of libidinal energy, based on the ideas of Wilheim Reich's Orgone.
Formally, these futures are manifesting into our current context through a variety of material and hyperstitional strategies- through the use of screens and holograms, that hint at the extra-dimensionality of the future that is yet to come, and through the form of a wiki, which builds upon the world through a form of collaborative wiki.
Photography by Jonathan Tan
