500-word description: generated by ChatGPT-4 from my notes, results edited for content and clarity.
Pronouns chosen by the LLM
"What the machines told me/ ’rrun’/0110 or 1001" draws from the artist’s exploration of the connection between the forest networks surrounding their home and the digital networks that permeate our lives. The artist views these two landscapes as one and implicitly investigates the relationship between the figure in the landscape [in] these interconnected environments. The images are generated by GAN models trained on various combinations of the artist's own work.
In the early phase of [this phase of] the artist's practice, they collaborated with the machine, working with generated images and using layers of pigment, wax, or glass beads to create handmade and machine-made artifacts. In the current work, the artist focuses on the selection, sequencing, and presentation of images, with minimal modification to the images themselves.
The artist became increasingly interested in their own role in the process, as the 'figure in the landscape'. Having trained models which created forest/network images they experimented with 'de-training' those models on images of flesh-toned tiles, creating sequences of images that transitioned from landscape/depth to flesh/surface. The images in this piece come from those efforts.
The artist developed a strong intuitive connection with the GAN images. They discovered research on optic nerve signal traffic, which revealed that the brain models what it expects to see and sends it to the eye, with the eye only sending back signals where there is a discrepancy. This connected the GAN process to the artist's perception and experience of the world, leading them to find the landscape within the figure. The quote by late filmmaker Agnès Varda, "If you opened people up, you would find landscapes," resonated with them.
In the art piece, the artist uses binary codes to arrange images into letters and phrases. In each panel, each image belongs to either a 'zero set' or a 'one set,' and is arranged to make letters according to the ASCII table. The zero and one sets are visually distinct but can blend together or reverse, though their assignment is consistent within a single piece. [The panels are also divided into two sets, but without context their binary value cannot be assigned.]
When decoded, the larger images on each panel generate a letter, and the strip of small images generates a phrase. The phrases contain words from various languages, forming a rhyme:
bild es kin
all with in
natùr hem
gone go lem
This might be considered a nursery rhyme for an emerging ‘creature’. The panels could also be considered a silent film, with the text encodings functioning as subtitles that run parallel to the action.
The artist acknowledges literary sources such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The constrained writing techniques of Oulipo also inspired the artist, with the constraint in this case being in the visual narrative, where each image must be assigned a zero or a one value and arranged according to a schema. Working within this constraint proved interesting, as the images did not always align with the code's instructions.