CultTech Summit - Angewandte Digital Arts Showcase
Aeon Gawa [Hartwin Haselbauer]
“Survivalism through Replication”
“ The absurd act of self-replication—printers having sex.
the work satirizes the heated discourse surrounding machine
learning, privacy concerns, and the recursive generation
of data based on generated content, highlighting issues of
self-degradation and loss of diversity—yet it introduces an
organically inspired perspective into the debate.”
Concept
Survivalism through Replication
In an era of machine learning, where AI generated data is partly based on generated content evolving its potential degradation, where public Instagram posts become a database, this work stats this tangled, hilarious situation.
The work shows two printers attempt to replicate themselves—scanning, trying to copy and print their own form in a repetitive loop. The printer, originally designed as a functional object to transfer or multiply information into physical form, can be seen as an old-school database.
Seen as one whole object the work reminds of organs of a stem cell, copy and replicate their DNA in order to become two, and more. As Manovich notes, “the accumulation of data points creates emergent forms that mirror organic development”, the project draws conceptual parallels between embryonic stem cells—the foundational elements of life—and generative processes. (Cultural Analytics, 2020, p.213).
The absurd act of self-replication—printers having sex. If you will—the work satirizes the heated discourse of machine learning, maintaining privacy, data generation or generate incorrectly, self degradation and loss of diversity.
Responding to Denton et al.’s critique of dataset genealogy and the ethical discourse around fairness, transparency, and consent, the project imagines a speculative method of data collection that is hyper-local, consensual, and organically inspired. (On the Genealogy of Machine Learning Datasets, 2021, p.9)
haselwin@gmail.com
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