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Tag: change

Artist As Propagandist: Exploring Parallel Realities With AI

Misinformation and art intersect to explore and navigate the confusion between reality and fiction that typifies our times in the work of net artist Tim Boucher.

In works that run the gamut from books and hand-printed samizdat zines to the use of generative AI for video, text, and image-making, Boucher’s work uses hyperreality to delve into the murky shadows of the Uncanny Valley, evoking a weird, sometimes disorienting feeling of surfing the very edge of the collapse of meaning. Weaving together real and invented, human and AI elements to seamlessly blur the lines between them, Boucher exploits this chaos to create new semiotic spaces for radical meaning-making. Structurally, the work appropriates, satirizes, and detourns the forms and tropes of conspiracy theory, re-imagining them as a new form of art, and igniting them with the fuel of runaway AI.

While the contents of conspiracy theories often tend toward the ghoulish, harmful, or just plain wrong, they are inherently postmodern, acting as a vehicle for questioning established truths and power relationships—an activity which serves an important social function, if in many cases misguided in its ultimate application. Conspiracy theorists reject grand “official” narratives and instead create their own ad hoc temporary webs of meaning, challenging the legitimacy of the structures we rely on and deep beliefs previously taken for granted. The work asks big questions about whether there could be a way for art to reclaim this function of social critique that conspiracy theories currently embody in the popular consciousness, redirecting it towards more fruitful and creative ends?

The artist’s professional background in content moderation and censorship informs the work, at times borrowing from disinformation techniques observed in the field by state actors, repurposed as storytelling tools in open-ended creative networked narratives, and SEO manipulations to show how easily depictions of “reality” can be twisted and propagated. Misinformation is used here by the artist openly—not to deceive, but to reveal how fragile our systems for defining truth really are. The works expose how the artist’s role as propagandist, deploying “weaponized” artifacts to attempt to subversively actualize or undermine real or potential current or future states.

As a satirist working with the mode of the conspiracy theorist, the artist knowingly inhabits and exaggerates the conspiratorial narrative forms they aim to critique, imploding them from within. As the Onion’s amicus brief on parody put it, “Parodists intentionally inhabit the rhetorical form of their target in order to exaggerate or implode it”—a technique central to this practice.

Inspired by Dada absurdity, the artist’s ‘Nevermades’—collections of AI-generated artworks appearing to involve famous museums and galleries—extend Duchamp’s readymades concept into the post-truth, remote-first digital age, challenging the idea that authenticity requires physical presence – or even actual existence in the first place. These imagined or “aspirational” artworks (like flooding the Guggenheim Museum, and filling it with willow trees and beavers) comment on the art world’s status symbols—galleries, exhibitions, facades and physical artifacts—that can now be artificially fabricated at scale, significantly challenging their value in an online world dominated by images.

The use of AI serves to heighten the inherent tensions in the work. AI is used consciously as both a force that flattens expression into sameness and conformity and as a tool to rebel against the algorithmic culture of likes, shares, and validation – by exploiting and exposing the outliers, anomalies, errors, and vulnerabilities of these technologies. By transparently incorporating AI, the work proudly wears the use of these technologies as a kind of “scarlet letter,” confronting head-on the stigma against its use in creative sectors, and reimagining it as a vehicle and medium all its own for artistic exploration. At the same time, it shines a light on the absurdities and limitations of these technologies, and holds a mirror up to our own evolving reactions to them.

Ultimately, this metamodernist body of work oscillates between the deadly serious and the dangerously stupid and absurd, revealing the fragile and easily manipulated nature of our information systems and the social and political systems which rely on them. The work encourages the audience to consider conspiracy theory as an unrecognized folk art form—provocative and dangerous, to be sure, but one in many ways much like any art or cultural movement that questions authority. It disrupts the established order, challenges accepted facts, and compels us to face the instability of the narratives we hold onto, and, in its best form, opens up the space for change how things are today into how they could be, how we would likek them to be.

AI, misinformation, conspiracy, and hyperreality converge here to ask a simple but potent question: what is real, and who gets to decide?

Life in Utopia

Real life in Utopia is never quite like it’s depicted in the brochures.

Thomas More’s original Utopia was based on slavery. Oops. But at least the betrothed could see each other naked… though women also had to confess their sins to their husbands.

Bacon’s New Atlantis features a weird call-out of the “good Jew” Joabin, of the city of Bensalem. Strangely, here the betrothed had to send one of their friends to see the betrothed naked as a stand-in…

Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia includes a number of creepy sexual incidents, and proposes basically autonomous ethno-states for minority groups. Umm.

Each of these books gets a number of things very very wrong. Some perhaps intentionally so, to drive a particular point or theme home. Most though, the greater social-political context has changed irrevocably. Thus, making things which once seemed progressive and liberal in an impossibly restrictive regime of the time period, now seem just impossibly weird and wrong.

Why read utopias then? Why engage in this specific type of idiotic fantasy behavior? If we know so much of it to be baloney?

It’s cliche to say utopia & dystopia are two sides of the same coin. But it’s not even just that. It’s that it’s both extremes at once. You can’t always/often tell when an author was saying something satirically as commentary, or actually thought that. It’s hard to decode the thinking of writers sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t matter. It’s the impact that matters.

I posted something recently on my Subreddit that related to Huxley’s book, The Island (which I haven’t read yet), and someone took the liberty to highlight a few of the bad things that the story included, and then to declare (paraphrasing) that “Yeah, but you know Huxley was actually into that shit.”

I submit that it’s not that simple, and the skein of Utopias is infinitely more tangled than these kinds of simplistic interpretations. I’m reminded of an excellent passage in a recent Slate article about the utopian community of Auroville in India, and some tragic events that unfolded there.

It’s very easy to say, “Oh, come on. All these promises made, all these ideals, and it’s just a morass of humanity that just has not lived up to it in any ways…”

On the other hand, you can also look at these places and say, “Look at what they have achieved and look at what they have tried.” You could ask yourself, “Well, if a community sets itself lofty goals, and, let’s say, it achieves only 30 percent or even 40 percent of those goals, do we denigrate them for the 60 percent that they failed? Or do we praise them and admire them for the 30 percent they’ve achieved?”

Really, when it comes to the non-fictional attempts at instantiating a utopia, it depends what those 60% failures consist of. Does it involve needless human suffering and tragedy, and the abrogation of rights? If so, then we might do well to condemn it in the strongest of terms.

When it comes to books though, I propose that one viable approach could also be that we just “take a chill pill” and not get so bent out of shape about works of fiction, which reflected mores of the times they arose in and which have since moved on. It might be that the conflict between the good, the bad, the universal and specific, the ideal and the rea,l is exactly what drives this genre, and its entire utility in the first place.

Going back to that Grist piece for a second, there’s one other tangent of criticism in it that characters in Ecotopia “…display an eerie sameness that makes all human interaction in the book seem unsettlingly artificial…” If this were another genre apart from a traveler’s tale of a voyage to a Utopia – a tried and true format – then I would have more sympathy for that kind of critique (though, honestly, I have very little sympathy for most critiques – the ones I dish out especially).

As it stands though, one of the things I actually heartily enjoy about utopian fiction and utopian satires is specifically that the narrative and the characters are so so very thin. They are, in essence, lorecore. They are 98% exposition. They read like textbooks. The dramatic elements are so so. The drama instead is in the notion that this *could be* a real place – if we decided to make it so. That is, if we just re-jigger parts of our society and our world, we could have something not unlike the experiments described in this genre of books. They might turn out to be “true” utopias, or true dystopias, but they would at the very least be a try at something new, different, and perhaps unique. And that possibility is something worth preserving and exploring. In the process, it just might be possible we use that same faculty of dreaming and actualization to change the world.

Slow Claps for the Slow Collapse

I laugh at / die a little inside thinking about all the backlash and conspiracism around Covid restrictions. There’s nothing even left to say about it, is there?

To me this is and has always been a dry run for the “real deal” when all of this won’t be a drill anymore. We won’t have the option to cry about it politically, because the devastation will be visible all around us. (Even moreso than it already is, I mean.)

I watched this Tucker Carlson video earlier, from June 2021, with them suggesting there will be climate lockdowns, following Covid. I took a screenshot of one of the funnier (for me) bits:

The caption reads, “‘CLIMATE LOCKDOWN’ WOULD MEAN NO MORE RED MEAT & LIMITS ON VEHICLE USE.”

These guys live in a parallel universe to me, or else a tangent universe. Where these catastrophic systemic changes aren’t already happening and visible all around us on a massive, global scale. But I guess if you can get yourself to believe in a Flat Earth, you can get yourself to believe in anything, including the idea humans have nothing whatsoever to do with the emerging Earth Changes.

It’s not necessarily just a right-left division on this either. If only it were that simple. This article on phys.org is a good example of the meta-problem that I see in a lot of mainstream scientific discourse about these issues:

“Global warming will cause extreme sea levels to occur almost every year by the end of the century, impacting major coastlines worldwide, according to new research from an international team of scientists.”

If that only happens by the “end of the century” we will have been extremely lucky. My personal prediction, based on I guess merely paranoia, intuition, observation, and catastrophism is that we’ll see these events increase in frequency and severity globally within the next 5-10 years. All the predictions are playing it way too safe. I don’t know why. To appear credible? To build options for the reporting team to pull down grant money with whatever their particular prescribed brand of fix is? Unclear.

I suspect it is more along the lines of that nobody wants to be that pessimistic. Nobody wants to be like: this will happen not just within our lifetimes, but within the next few years. In fact, it’s already happening. You look like a dick when you’re that guy, but here we are.

So the thing that’s outright wrong for me about that Fox News screengrab above, with them crowing about red meat and driving (American rights, obvs), is that because people are not pessimistic enough about what’s happening (a.k.a., realistic), then they will not be aggressive enough about near term mitigation.

In other words, by the time we see “lockdowns” in place around Climate Change, it will not be because it’s some optional thing put in place by a government you don’t like or agree with. It will because red meat was wiped out by a super-plague (see: African swine fever in China for a parallel example). And entire cities were lost due to extreme weather events, so not only were supply chains massively disrupted, but there is an increased strain on neighboring resources caused by climate refugees. “Driving restrictions” will be in place because there is not that much fuel available anymore. Or because the government of the place you live collapsed, so the roads aren’t kept up anymore. And you basically can’t get parts to fix your car.

But yeah, keep crying about Communism & China. Defend your god-given right to infect one another at Lollapalooza. Stick to your small games where the bad guys are easy to spot, and ignorance of the enormity of the real problems facing not just the U.S., but all of us, is bliss. It seems to be working great so far, right?

I’m not gonna preach about it that much more. I just find it annoying, so had to rant. Me, I’m studying up to buy or maybe build a whole house air filter to plug into the supply side of my HRV (air exchange system). Because the sun turned red one evening this summer from wildfires that are many hours’ drive away. To me, now, the question is simply how to adapt & survive under conditions on the ground which are already showing indicators of radically altering. It’s not about prepping for “one day” when the SHTF. It’s already too late. The fan was made of shit all along.

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