old minds, new bodies

In the age of global interconnectedness, artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly important. Decisions are no longer made solely by humans, but by algorithms trained on gigantic datasets. In the race for the best AI, global tech companies promise that it will end poverty, stop climate change, and cure all diseases, while the AIs are ruthlessly trained on the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form. Artificial intelligence thus becomes an instrument of capitalist principles, built to amplify exploitation and further concentrate power and wealth: Training a single AI model already exceeds the total greenhouse gas emissions of a car in its entire life cycle by many times.

If an AI outputs freely invented or false information, this is referred to as "hallucinating". What is simply output data garbage is highly stylized into something mystical and superhuman. A series of wall-mounted ceramics tests the extent to which image-generating algorithms manifest themselves in their own output data. An AI was trained for two weeks on a custom dataset of human anatomy model images downloaded from the internet and output over 2 million generated images with increasing realism. Due to the insufficient size of the dataset and the varying images, distorted biological shapes were produced that deviated greatly from anatomical reality. (“fakes”)

For "exit a car" a 3d scan of the artist's hands was processed into a photorealistic digital 3d model. Supported by algorithms, the digital hands are set into motion by applying a motion animation loaded from an online database. The motion has never been executed this way by the artist himself. Through new technologies, the photographic image develops a life of its own that is characteristic of data in the age of the Internet. It becomes arbitrarily duplicable, editable and controllable. "exit a car" is the title of the motion animation in the digital database.

Based on a video of the artist folding his arms, an algorithm interpreted the movement and calculated motion data that is applied on a set of digital bones, mimicking a skeleton. The wall-mounted object shows both the artist’s pose but also the algorithm’s interpretation of it.

The datasets for AI models require a massive amount of data that often reproduce or even enhance biases and discrimination omnipresent in contemporary society. Old thoughts take on a new technoid form - old minds, new bodies