The Robot Does Not Exist: Remixing Psychic Automatism and Artificial Creative Intelligence
Article co-written with Mark Amerika and Brad Gallagher as MALK, Media-N Journal, 2021
The Robot Does Not Exist: Remixing Psychic Automatism and Artificial Creative Intelligence
Vol. 17 No. 1 (2021): Forking Paths in New Media Art Practices: Investigating Remix, Media-N Journal
Published: Feb 8, 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21900/j.median.v17i1.810
In the just-published Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital Media Object from the Onto-Tales of the Digital Afterlife, artists Mark Amerika and Laura Hyunjhee Kim perform as MALK, a new media remix band that ruminates on the post-digital life of the traditional scholarly book. Working against the concept of an e-book, the publication includes an original music video titled the Digital Afterlife as well as a downloadable PDF that the artists refer to as an imaginary digital media object (IDMO). The work has been released as the inaugural publication in the new MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series with Open Humanities Press.
For this special issue of Media-N, MALK proposes their next IDMO track by focusing on the relationship between AI-generated forms of remix and artist-generated forms of psychic automatism. The experiment will start with the artists improvising a cluster of hand-drawn charts that conceptually blend their musings on what they refer to as “future forms of artificial creative intelligence.” The language in these charts will then serve as source material to input into an advanced Generative Pre-trained Transformer to trigger source material for a new music video and an adjoining PDF. Our question is whether the Generative Pre-trained Transformer as an advanced yet still essentially weak AI can co-write the artists’ IDMO as they address issues related to their research into psychic automatism and artificial creative intelligence.
For this special issue of Media-N, MALK proposes their next IDMO track by focusing on the relationship between AI-generated forms of remix and artist-generated forms of psychic automatism. The experiment will start with the artists improvising a cluster of hand-drawn charts that conceptually blend their musings on what they refer to as “future forms of artificial creative intelligence.” The language in these charts will then serve as source material to input into an advanced Generative Pre-trained Transformer to trigger source material for a new music video and an adjoining PDF. Our question is whether the Generative Pre-trained Transformer as an advanced yet still essentially weak AI can co-write the artists’ IDMO as they address issues related to their research into psychic automatism and artificial creative intelligence.
A video by MALK (Mark Amerika + Laura Kim)
Sound by Chad Mossholder
Sound by Chad Mossholder
The Robot Does Not Exist
(Video, 2020)
The Robot Does Not Exist
(Video, 2020)
I am open to collaborations!
DM me, maybe?
DM me, maybe?