Lopsided skulls. Mercurial skin. Bionic body parts. The ageless AI-generated entities in Landscapes (2021) look, at once, primordial and fantastical, familiar and foreign, of nature and artifice, helping us experience the self as an evolving network —’the network self’— whose identity is multiple, complex and fluid.
Evolving directly from Crosslucid’s book Landscapes Between Eternities (Distanz Verlag, 2018) of otherworldly portrait-assemblages, inclusive of its entire creative process, these post-race, post-gender cyborgs were co-created with a set of custom neural networks trained by data alchemists Martino Sarolli & Emanuela Quaranta and distributed worldwide as 5000 unique magazine covers.
The work irradiates a framework that recognises the inherent complexity and multidimensionality of (not just human) beings. Seeing ourselves as a network transforms into a fertile ground to begin understanding our inherent complexity. Thus it encourages us to reckon with the ways in which the overall character of a self assembles from the unique interrelatedness of its particular relational traits.
This acceptance infuses us with powerful potential to part with the rigid and reductive stereotyping that dominates an overwhelming part of our reality. While we might never understand ourselves or others perfectly, some fragments of our identities and perspectives do often overlap. Instead of perceiving our multiple identities as separating us from one another, we should see them as bases to cultivate more productive communication and understanding.
The 14 videos become keys to an upcoming web-based experience, an immersion into the inner structures of the networks, where all generated images are to be experienced simultaneously. For the lucky owners, they will unlock an early access and a possibility of choosing three avatars for their private collection.
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