The Flickr Crossingthebridge Image Generatr

Budapest / Hungary

Taken at:
The Bradbury Project,
maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Bradbury%20Project/234/139/41

Crossing from one leaf to the other on the Lasalle Street Bridge

Chicago, Illinois 41.887511, -87.632375
February 18, 2024

From the Flickr 20th Anniversary Photowalk in Chicago

Thanks to Statevillain for suggesting this shot!
www.flickr.com/photos/statevillians_alluring_photography

COPYRIGHT 2024 by JimFrazier All Rights Reserved. This may NOT be used for ANY reason without written consent from Jim Frazier.


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The project is developed using various pre-set text-to-image models, processing text prompt inputs. On the borderline between sensitive content and an easy slip into topics of violence, this project visualizes the depths of the subconscious of these models, excavating the influences of media and online information exchange. The quantified traces of reality and collective histories allow algorithms to generate content that recycles the past – building the spine of quasi-historical narratives – often obfuscated with prejudice and misinformation, along with the author’s personal bias. Generated outputs are presented inside a hypertext object – a tent that the audience can enter, as it were.

Photo: Florian Voggeneder

Maria Orciuoli’s first video work discusses consumer culture and accelerationism from the point of view of the body and the mind. The installation consists of a video projection, gummy candies, and a customized sensor seat. The artist is shown ravenously eating a pile of waste: a binge eating ritual until the closing purging ceremony. Filtered through the artist’s experience of recovering from an eating disorder, the video questions society’s mainstream values as the protagonist finds herself oversaturated by conflicting impulses. Borrowing the title from the 2017 Astronomical Journal report on the RZ Piscium star dubbed Eater of Worlds for being surrounded by the wreckage of planets it has consumed, the video is a commentary on the current “capitalism hangover”.


Photo: Florian Voggeneder

Per aspera ad acta I follows the footnotes of a branch of science seeking to explore emotion. The sculpture, a modified filing cabinet, presents a collection of visual output from experiments that sought to prove that emotions can be read from facial expressions and gestures. Early on, science played with the idea that certain facial expressions could be assigned to specific emotions. Today’s emotion research now contradicts these theories. So far, no system has identified clear features that measurably distinguish emotions on or in the body. This means that many politically highly relevant technologies, such as the use of surveillance technologies at national borders, are already based on false assumptions.

Photo: Florian Voggeneder

Photosynthetic You explores fundamental ethical questions related to the renewed debate on genetics, reaching as far as the hypothesis of being able to exchange our human genes with those of other species using innovative systems such as CRISPR/Cas. What if we can all decide, paradoxically and in an extreme, mass democratic act, to become thin and motionless like leaves, energetically self-sufficient like plants, feeding only on light and solar power? Starting from scientific and artistic suggestions around the topic of “becoming plant-like” and using keywords like photosynthesis, autotrophy and hybridization, Vanessa V proposes an open discussion between science and art. The workshop delves deeper into the ethical questions that emerged from the artist’s installation Photosynthetic You.

Photo: Florian Voggeneder

When considering our bodies, we are most often concerned with the visual, surface components. Its functional interior organs are usually, at best, ignored. Becoming aware of them usually only happens when health concerns occur, so the lack of concern is most often a source of comfort. Over the past century, the medical industry has dramatically improved our ability to represent these elements through imagery that obscures the outside layers. There is no race in a torso x-ray, or gender in a cranial CT. This work shows how inwardly we are all identical, by merging layers of diverse bodily interiors into a 3D chimera of the human interior – an imaginary hybrid, devoid of the characteristics frequently considered definitive of our physical selves.

Photo: Florian Voggeneder

What are the changing conditions for archaeology in underwater ecosystems? Can challenges be predicted and solutions imagined using machine learning? With the passage of time, underwater artifacts are encrusted with coral, algae or other marine organisms. How do human activities and pollutions undermine these natural environments? What will our underwa-ter heritage be like in the future? The project explores how algorithms can be used for predicting new entanglements be-tween underwater artifacts and the changing environment where they are discovered. Built upon experimental speculation, Future Memories of Deep Water calls for the protection of threatened marine ecosystems and aims to create awareness and encourage preservation of cultural heritage.

Photo: Florian Voggeneder

The Checkpoint lets users interact with the artist’s family’s farm archive in Cumaribo, Vichada, Colombia. The archive was created in the Open Mountain art laboratory, dealing with Colombian violence and how it is expressed through family memories and territory. The war in Colombia has been long, the government has failed to recognize it and it is hard for the victims of violence to find answers. The Checkpoint, while not a story itself, is an attempt to build the experience of a story. The users create a different narrative every time they interact. In that sense, the artwork recovers this lost truth, not as forensic or investigative reconstruction, but a collection of memories that are related to the experience of living in a place of conflict.

Photo: Florian Voggeneder

The Uncanny TV is an interactive installation whereby browsing through TV channels the spectator is invited to discover the mystery of the ghost hidden inside the uncanny imagination of electronic media. The TV channels in the installation are built from AI-generated animation and video works. They offer a deeper investigation into the world of uncanniness. As Ernst Jentsch said: “If one wants to come closer to the essence of the uncanny, it is better not to ask what it is, but rather to investigate how the effective excitement of the uncanny arises in psychological terms, how the psychical conditions must be constituted so that the ‘uncanny’ sensation emerges.”

Photo: Florian Voggeneder