Tezos

Transformmations and Terrors

Creator

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Description

News From Nowhere, a collaboration between Chris Follows, William Morris and AI. Newspaper hallucinations from work influenced by William Morris novel ‘News from Nowhere’ (1890). I’m drawn to parallels of a utopian vision in Morris’s novel (society free from capitalism, where art and life are integrated, proposing a hopeful alternative vision) and aspirations of web3 decentralised society, both seemingly visions of unobtainable, utopian futures. Morris’s novel, ‘News from Nowhere’ is framed as a dream narrative where the protagonist (based on Morris himself) falls asleep and awakens in London in the year 2102. The Utopian Society: Morris depicts a post-revolutionary England that has been transformed into a decentralized, pastoral socialist commonwealth. Key features: Money has been abolished; people work voluntarily and share goods freely based on need rather than exchange The state has withered away; there are no laws, police, or formal government structures Labor is voluntary and fulfilling; people choose work they enjoy, and much of it involves craftsmanship and art The use of AI interests me in relation to the themes of Morris’s work regarding his rejection of ‘the dehumanizing effects of industrialization and mass production and how this reflects discussions we’re having today in our attempts to make sense of the all-pervasive nature of AI in our everyday lives. I’m interested in how AI doesn’t ‘think’ in terms of human language, instead processing the text information and generating responses based on statistical patterns derived from the text data it’s trained on. I like how the AI generated newspaper creates the AI gobbledygook text and sometimes creates meaning in parts of text. I like the possibility that the AI generates its own language form of communication that humans don't understand. The generation of AI images in the context of the newspaper articles is interesting; I plan to use these article images for new mesh painting works.

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