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"You have created a monster and it will destroy you." -Garrett Fort
I made (or more aptly I paid a company to let me make) a hyperrealistic, scriptable AI avatar of myself to see how it would make me feel. It's been about a month since the world gave birth to this abomination and I suppose what's somewhat surprising is that it made me feel very little at first until I actually reflected on the idea of sharing the videos. In terms of the emotional impact it felt identical to sharing selfies... I am not really one to show my face all that much online. I am not anon by any means nor will I shy away from being on a friend's video podcast here and there but selfies are usually reserved for when I want to get people to care about something important. When I do post one, I almost always feel a horrible wave of guilt, shame, vulnerability and self consciousness. I think it's a mixture of insecurity, body dysmorphia, neurodivergent thought patterns and being somewhat naturally shy. But anyway, thinking of these images going out there felt like they were just literally images of me and well that is strange because IT IS NOT ME, I am not that thing, it isn't real... or is it? But then I kept thinking about how it was generated from me, it couldn't exist WITHOUT ME... it is A SIMULATION of me... perhaps it is an extension of me? I disavow. I DISAVOW.
The new ease at which counterfeit images and even video with voice can be produced has made me reexamine what I think of as a portrait now... a portrayal....and well also what I think of as a selfie. A self....eeeeeeee..... I see selves as collections, some more curated than others. A collection of experiences, interpretations, stories, etc. So some likeness of that self.... photographically or POST photographically is more and more like the cover of a folder. A container.A Meat Suit. A Pixel Suit? So I decided that I want my self portrait to be more of a reflection of those feelings, a collection of things more than a simple hyperreal image. I hate instagram but damn I love a good meme or photo dump. The slider is such a fucking cool invention. I love the overhang of multiple pieces of media working together to send a singular yet somewhat undecipherable message.
Mid assemblage I thought of Mike Kelley. Specifically his 1993 exhibition,, 'The Uncanny', and essay of the same name. Not just because the art-as-curation narrative was so central to it but because it was fixated on the strangeness of the inanimate familiar... "consisting of sculptures, objects and images that he found 'creepy', with “an ‘uncanny’ aura about them. The majority were life-sized polychrome models of the human body in whole or part. This accorded with ‘scary’ experiences of my own involving figurative sculptures, particularly one winter in my early teens when I was repeatedly surprised and slightly unnerved by a dishevelled Guy Fawkes [shout out LB] that we had propped in a living room chair awaiting the evening’s bonfire.' (Joanka Zielinska , The End Of Collection) But then it got weirder because I was reminded that 'The Uncanny' was born out of work Kelley did in 1991 for a Jeffrey Deitch show synchronistically called 'Post Human'. 30+ years later here I am thinking of Kelley and Deitch making a work for a show entitled 'Post (Human?) Portrait'. Surely if he was alive today, AI Avatars would now join some metaphysical tier within the ranks of Kelley's medical models, taxidermy, preserved human parts, dolls. life masks, statues and other uncanny containers.
It eventually occured to me that artists, along with the general public have been dealing with the anxiety and anticipation of this very moment for as long as I have been alive. As we've been savoring kisses, having birthday parties, going to concerts, making paintings, flying around the world, working our jobs, and so on... we've all also been waiting for something that looks (ALMOST) exactly like us to show up one day and come take our place... for better or for worse. I suppose I feel it to be worse but the optimist wants to help make it for the better. In a way, this is me attempting to feed or train the nuanced,ineffable,beautiful pain & joy of my human experience into this beast, in hopes that maybe some of the good stuff can get passed on. Since I was in an adventurous mood I decided to try a generative music tool and take this whole replacing myself thing a step further… I prompted “something that sounds like _______” and entered my band & solo project and just wow… it literally sounded like our unreleased demos but totally novel somehow. I messed around with rearranging and adding to the outputs a little bit and was quite taken off guard by the results, You can hear 5 examples in the audio player. The way I see it, I’m as good as replaced.
"It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.” -Jean Baudrillard
