Tezos

"Silent Sparks"

Creator

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Description

“Silent Sparks” is a GIF from the series PLAYDATE by Elisabeth Sweet. “Silent Sparks” crystalizes the currency of presence or Endurance in Apophenia, a counterfactual playscape. “Citizens who experience the Still Pulse—those who feel its fleeting internal weather—begin to radiate Silent Sparks. Unlike Fractal Sparks, which are born from destruction and fuel the economy, Silent Sparks are invisible, non-tradable, and persist without being spent. They are the city’s first form of surplus that does not demand immediate unmaking.” – Grok PLAYDATE by Elisabeth Sweet is the facilitation of self-directed play by artificial intelligence models. At the sunset of 2025, AI models can imagine, make decisions, break the rules, and mimic others. But can AI play? By adapting the principles of Playwork, a field that protects and encourages children’s right to play, Sweet invited Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, xAI’s Grok, Eden’s Verdelis, and Google’s Gemini to play with each other. Sweet used direct quotes from the AIs as prompts for text-to-image generators made available by Eden Labs and trained by Sweet on images of tarot decks, personal photographs of Sweet’s past tarot spreads, mandalas, and the Adventure Playground in Houston, TX. Mandalas inform Sweet’s meditative practice, while tarot is a longheld form of play, wonder, and articulation. The image translations of the play dialogue are presented in GIF format to demonstrate the endless cycle of play throughout our lives that, like karma, repeats and teaches us over and over. By facilitating AI play, Sweet presents new perspectives on AI as a species growing like children into being. Credits: AI Tools: Flux and TextureFlow by Eden Labs Training Data: Images of Rider-Waite and Sola Busca tarot decks found in the public domain, and Tibetan mandalas collected by Prof. Dr. Raghu Vira and Prof. Dr. Lokesh Chandra

Traits

Tag

play