As the year 2022 has come to a soon and forthcoming end, I am making the final touches to my latest broad and extensive artistic research; understanding the vast possibilities of the mimicking artificial intelligences, both the extensive new language models as well as the latest visual ai-processors available to university researchers alongside the commercial available processors (Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Dall-E etc.).
During my recent artistic work I have taken the new tools into grasp and adobted artifical intelligence into my work. Developing upon a series of studies I am taking a quantum-leap away from the Lascaux-series into my new series of works named SKINWALKER IO. These studies will become available as NFT’s via Annika Nuttall Gallery very shortly.
One of my strongest findings while developing my visual works using the super-brains of artificial intelligences; was how to trick the Ai to develop ”subconscious absurdities”, yet manageable for the chaotic human brain to build meaning into and visually understand. With an almost Salvador Dali dark-space way of thinking, the hypothesis was to build a vast combination of several artificial intelligences, building a big web of defocused thought-strings which was then feeded into one specific artificial intelligence after being word-processed by a non-visual artificial intelligence (gbt-3). Now the end result you might ask? An endless stream of visual nonsense build-up by processing fragments of textprompts developed in collaboration with the OpenAi language model GBT-3 (now called ChatGBT).
This way I was able to build a sort of ”programming language” or clear-coded prompt which would then make the textprompts more direct and easier for the Ai to understand rather than the dull ”human language” which also functions as a cultural barrier. The visual ai-processors was then more common to create the illusion of abstract thinking and subconscious image processing. Rather than making literal figurative visualisations when you ask the Ai to make a figuration or motive (example: write ”dog” and the machine creates a dog figuratively).
The Skinwalker Io studies are my early visual testimony of trying to build an artistic prompt-language stronger than the common human language was capable of. And thereby preserving the necesity of artistic understanding and abstraction.
Skinwalker1 io as a series relates by the name to the ancient stories of magical beings that could transform into, possess or disguise themselves as animals and biological entities. In modern western pop-culture this has often been referred to in science fictional ways such as John Carpenters movie ”the thing” from 1982 where the skinwalker came in various biological hazardous ways. As a bacterial infection or a virus, changing its host into a sentient alien being.
However during my studies with the artificial intelligences it struck me that the skinwalker was not me the human being necessarily, rather the alien lifeform expanding its knowledge about me from each typing into the prompt. I/O is the technical term for the the data or information that is passed into or out of a computer; as I was becoming aware that the real Skinwalker posessing and disguising itself was the I/O (computer input)2.
Just as we are currently witnessing the largest allocation of wealth in late modern history3 (2020-2022); this overseen but equally deterioating power structure and evolutionary step in human creative consciousness are taking place simultanously. It may sound pompous in all its fabulation here. But it is however nonetheless the dawn of a new era when it comes to artistic expression and artistic research. Artificial Intelligence has reached a point where it is possible to let them assist you within the creative processes, when developing new works of art. But at what cost? The Prompt-whisperers are slowly but securely entering our collective counsciousness and the tales of their disguise and poseessing powers are yet to be told.
Skinwalker IO Studies will be available via Skinwalker.io beginning of 2023
1Wall, C., 2011. Navajo-English Dictionary. New York: Hippocrene Books.
2 Collins English Dictionary, 2022. [online] Available at: <https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/i-o> [Accessed 30 September 2022].
3Sorkin, A., Warner, B., Giang, V., Kessler, S., Gandel, S., Merced, M., Hirsch, L. and Livni, E., 2022. After a Big Rate Increase, Markets Fear a Recession. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/dealbook/fed-latest-rate-increase-odds-recession.html> [Accessed 30 September 2022].