Lyssningsrum, Slupskjulsvägen 30, Stockholm (Sweden)_2024
This show consisted of sound performaces in with work shown by Ash Gwgbt, Lewis Henderson, August Hoffmann, Kaja Haven and Judit Weegar. Organised and facilitated by Daniel M. Karlsson.
In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Hamlet and his friends; Bernardo,
Marcellus and Horatio are visited by a spectre of his dead father. The ghost influences
Hamlet’s present and future actions from the grave and becomes able to transcend
death and speak from the past through time.
This too is true of technologies, the things we make carry
codified representations of the maker and the time they were conceived and
constructed. And this too is what’s happening with artificial intelligence.
It is being trained on our online activity, our likes, our
posts, PDFs we share, YouTube videos we produce, our private messages we send
to each other, the music we listen to and even how long our curser hovers over
something before clicking or not clicking. You need a vast amount of data to
feed these hungry machines, they will consume every piece of documented
material, old or new, that’s ever been input into a computer.
In essence what it is trying to do is trick us into thinking
it can think for itself. The machine isn’t interested in the meaning of the
sentence, only the patterns and probabilities that relate the different words
together. It isn’t smart in the same way as humans are, what it is actually doing
is applying a statistical mathematical formula to mimic human behaviour from its
millions and millions of bits of analysed data. Reflecting an image of society
back onto itself. “A technology driven by the aim of giving you today another
version of what you had yesterday and never a different tomorrow.”
That means that within the code making up the AI models
exists the specters of the past, ghosts within the systems, ghosts written into
our documented past that govern they way this new technology functions. This
will make the statement; there is no
history, only recorded history, and that history is written by the victors –
a terrifying reality as it is this documented past that will dictate how the AI
formulates its decisions. Decisions made by models built on specters of human
pasts, pasts of prejudice, bigotry, sexism and racism that will come back to
haunt the present.
AI is built on mathematics, a gendered binary system unable
to break from the past and create anything truly different. It, like computers has
no way of producing something truly random. Take for instance SuperCollider,
the software that many of the works today will be shown and made with, to
generate a random number it takes the temperature of the computers CPU as a
parameter to calculate a number that is random. A number that is near make solely on a binary system. Another example, used by
computers that deal with online gambling and password generation is to sample Cosmic
Microwave Background Radiation. This radiation is the faint remnant glow of the
big bang and produces a static unpredictable and truly random number that can be used by
binary systems like computers that need
randomness.
The English artist and author James Bridle wrote about
randomness in their 2022 book Ways Of Being, saying that: “randomness = a
foundation for radical equality”. Chance is brilliant because it isn’t a system
based on prejudice and nepotism, it’s a system based on randomness. If you have
an infinity of random possibilities you can transcend the specter and make
something that has the possibility of creating something new.
How do you
explain infinity? How do you explain chance? One rather comical and wildly
popular way is with Borel's monkeys, also
known as the infinite-monkey theorem.
What
I’ve tried to do here, with this work that I will run in a second, is to add in
a random element that will act to reinterpret Hamlet. Like a Dada poem made up
by randomly cutting out and re-arranging the words of a pre-existing poem to make something
new. We have set up an algorithm on SuperCollider to re-order the words of
hamlet into a completely unique new format, that being said it has the very
slight possibility to be re-ordered by complete chance into the exact original
order conceived by William Shakespeare. I’ve also constructed the voice from a
recent performance of Hamlet that is being read by an AI, so maybe this is one
way an AI will be able to re-organise the past into something truly new.
Just
a little disclaimer here, it probably won’t make any linguistic sense, but if
it comes out with some pattern of words that seems like it has actually become
sentient – it hasn’t it’s just you seeing the face of Jesus burnt into the
bottom of your frying pan.