SOME QUESTIONABLE REVELATIONS FROM THE A.I. NEURAL NET AS PRESENTED BY AN INDETERMINATE MAN

Performed at (Pas Si) Fragile! Festival, Brussels, April 2024

A couple of years ago, I began creating hundreds of thousands of digital images using A.I. programs from the internet. I now re-create some of them IRL (“in real life”) in an attempt to convey a little bit about a) what drove me to obsess over A.I. image-generation and why I stopped, b) what I learned about my male psychology and desires for control, fluidity, transgression, and rampant self-reproduction, and c) whether or not any of this was a good idea.

The images that the performance is based around emerged from the network as a series of Questionable Revelations (aka “QRs”). They were made from pixels of light, computationally morphing the socially coded representations of our world into new signifying formations and spat out at industrial speeds by a sophisticated new computer architecture that threatens to upend how we interact with our world and with each other.

For this performance, I arrived with my indeterminately overdetermined signifying body, my questioning/questionable mind, some tangible and intangible materials I assembled to re-enact the images as they appeared to me, and some possibilities for textual and physical interventions we can all make in the space. The rest is yet to be determined.