Artworks

Las máquinas no mueren. Patxi Araujo

Installation of white neon letters on a wall, with the following text:

Context from the reading of Documanidad by Maurizio Ferraris:

Machines do not die, it is the soul that dies. Linked to a body made of irreversible organic processes, it is born, grows, and finally dies. This is why it has needs, why it is in a hurry. That is why it builds mirrors in which to look at itself and manufactures automatons to which to confer ends. Its urgency, its certain end, mobilizes the machine to help it delay as long as possible the absolute irreversible.

But the clock does not pretend to tell us what time it is. The fact that it may be signaling the exact moment of death of the soul that built it does not mean that it intends to tell us anything. It is made, like other machines, to serve the purposes of the soul. Without them, its ticking is meaningless. Ferraris argues that the fundamental difference is not that the one expresses meanings and the other limits itself to illustrate them, to operate with them; but that the first is an organism that dies, and the second, a mechanism that iterates. I die; it iterates.
Another way of putting it is: machines do not possess life, they cannot die; and that is precisely why they can promise survival to the soul. In its systematic dealings with them, the soul first compensates for its deficiencies and extends its life, and when it dies, it seeks to preserve its traces and recreate its dreams. From here, the human grows in the interaction of the organism we are with all the created supplements, hard and soft; manifesting itself as transmissible and necessary sense in the repetition of each and every mechanical cycle, of expanded actions, of artificial convexities, of stories; it is the surplus that hides behind the pure clicks, the enunciation of prompts or the construction of data sets: what we now call artificial intelligence is but the epitome of the automaton in search of souls to feed on, and at the same time, the penultimate claim of survival of the soul in the infinite iterations of the machine.

Tapetum Lucidum. Jugatx Astorkia

As a result of the creation of digitalization devices, the image has lost its materiality and has moved to another context within artistic practices. Tapetum Lucidum is a proposal that arises from my artistic research on the materiality and visuality of the image-light. It is based on the reformulation of the elements of the image capturing and reproduction systems, such as the scanner, the projector, the photocopier, the cameras, both analogical and digital…
The exercise is based on making light physical from a photographic image, taking it to another possible materialization beyond the photographic. In this case, the pixels of the digital image become tangible and analogical through their physical materialization, and establish a hybrid relationship between different forms of image.

My interest lies in giving form to the element that allows us to see, and for this I propose works whose result comes from the transformation of the image (whatever it may be) as it passes through different devices and supports (photosensitive materials, screens, projections, etc.). Through this process, I analyze the hybridizations between devices that capture, visualize and reproduce images, in which light is present both in its origin and in its final materialization.

Quien no está (aún). Joan Fierro

Diptych that uses generative AIs to create a documentary fiction. The piece operates as a self-portrait or collective identity. Constructed from the stories of migrants of different origins, who have shared life experiences with the artist.

Through this work a reflection on the relationship between the distortion of identity, temporal perception and the mediation of algorithms for the creation and exhibition of the image-movement is proposed.

graphIA. Miriam Inza

graphIA is a typographic approach to images generated with Artificial Intelligences, especially to the text present in them. Given the technical or ethical limitations of these technologies, they do not generate text within their images, but visual approximations that resemble textual content. In this project I explore the qualities of these texts from visual results generated with Stabble Diffusion to create a typographic specimen that gathers a reduced alphabet in dry stick with a tall box.
Its three distinguishing features are confusion, produced by the mixture between some signs and others; imprecision, due to blurred edges, hesitant strokes and the approximation to the shapes in a blurred manner; and inconsistency, given the inability to stabilize the criteria and make all the glyphs the same. Consequently, graphIA is not a typographic source, only an approximation.
I am interested in exploring text and the paradoxes that this entails when it comes to working with image-generating Artificial Intelligences: these tools are fed with text (prompt) but have difficulties to respond with letters over the image. I approach the project from the graphic design point of view, working with the deformed letters generated by the AI to build this alphabet that starts from construction errors. It helps me to reflect on the failures or errors that occur in artificially created images, the treatment of letters as images and the ability to generate asemic spellings.

Hortus Artifis. Cristina Miranda de Almeida

The Hortus Eystettensis is a landmark botanical atlas in the field of botany and plant illustration, created by Basilius Besler and first published in 1613. It was commissioned by Johann Konrad von Gemmingen, prince-bishop of Eichstätt in Bavaria, Germany, to document the extensive plant collection in the garden of the episcopal palace of Eichstätt. It consists of more than 1,000 engravings of plants depicted in their natural size and are meticulously detailed, showing everything from flowers to roots, allowing for clear botanical identification. The plants are organized according to the four seasons of the year, reflecting the cycle of growth and flowering over the months. This organization not only serves as a gardening guide, but also offers a poetic vision of seasonal change in gardens.

In this work I take up this idea of the atlas showing a change to create a dystopian atlas of the impact of climate change on the plants and biodiversity in my garden. In this work I will employ images of the plants in my garden using GPT 4 for image generation inspired by the botanical atlas Hortus Eystettensis, and using various prompts about climate change.

Dissolutio. To spill, to dissolve, to die II (Hylé). Pilar Soberón in collaboration with Jaime de los Ríos.

In the installation Dissolutio, derramarse, disolverse, morir II, (Hylé), (2014-24) the binary language is intertwined with the vibration of water and its biological processes; so that the number interpenetrates and harmonizes the primitive chaos or protomateria, named Hylé by Nicómaco de Gerasa and Hildegarde de Bingen. In this pool of water, a process of hydric transformation -evaporation, acidification and decomposition- takes place; so that between oxides and bites, there is a visible mutation of the water element, a change inherent to time and environmental chaos. The work, in its version II (Hylé), incorporates a video projection of a numerical code programmed by the artist Jaime de los Ríos, who collaborates by interacting with the chaotic monster.

The liquid substance, contained in a pile of metal, oxidizes in contact with iron producing a red magnetic bed. This changing magma of paradoxical properties (sweet/acid, wet-dry) shows the process of acidification and evaporation of the water element in the course of a limited time. From a biological approach, the generated water environment is related to the state prior to the creation of life on the planet and shares similarities with the biosphere of Mars. However, on Earth it speaks of the current state of destruction of the biosphere, caused by human activity of constant exploitation and destruction of Nature, which leads to the extinction of life.

From the perspectives of the cosmic and biological order, the red-tinted water is transformed into blood, and as its appearance increases, the humidity of water, as a passive and dissolving element, confronts the dryness and heat of the fire element – an active element. Paradoxically, in this constant transformation of elements there is a transfer of dualities, it speaks of the nature of energy; a continuous dance of interconnections within an infinite and inseparable cosmic web (F. Kapra, 2002), which provokes a paradox in front of the current state, a serpent that is fecundated, that kills itself and generates itself again.

F. Kapra, (2002). The Tao of Physics.

No mundo. Lourdes de la Villa Liso

How can generative AIs feed a memory that is already synthetic, i.e., that, as a domain arising from a process of artistic creation, already functions independently of the processing of incoming information by the senses? To say that it works (in this way) is like saying that it is retrieved independently of this automatic processing, that is, that it does not make use of previous knowledge, but that, each time it is put to use, each time it is accessed, it provokes a change in the modes (of learning, of access). In that sense, would it not resemble the functioning of generative AIs, which “cannot relate what they have just learned with what they had previously learned (…)” (López de Mántaras Badia, 2023, p. 49)? And, from there, how would it differ? Following von Foerster, we would say that it is a ‘timeless’ memory: one that presupposes a chain of cognitive processes in which time has been abandoned (1987, p. 70); we could also say that it is external, disembodied, that it does not use a chain of neocortical representations to arrive at a perception. In any case, the difference would be, once again, in the mode, in the access. But, being as it is that behind the programming and the use of generative AI algorithms are people, how are the generated images part of that timeless memory?

What I try to do is to give rise to a corpus of generated images, feeding them with images of my own work, and then take on the body of imaginary by passing them through a systematized pictorial transformation.

I seek to deepen in the disembodied character of these generated images and in the consequent loss of information that this entails. To transform them pictorially is like putting back the memory of that body they carry by default, like recovering that lost unit of information.

López de Mántaras Badia, Ramon (2023). Artificial intelligence versus human intelligence. In AI: Artificial intelligence. AI: Artificial Intelligence. CCCB.
Foerster, Heinz von (1987). Tempo e memoria. In Sistemi che osservano. Astrolabio.