Daniel Leiter
Information
2024
For most of us checking our phones immediately upon waking, notifications buzz, ring, and pop up until we nod off again, keeping our brains in a constant hyper-alert state. Social media‘s pull-to-refresh command has become the new pull on the lever of slot machines, trapping us in a constant feedback loop with a new temptation just a swipe away. The techno-social reality demands postures our skeletal frames cannot support. The bones of Millenials and GenZ have been shown to become thinner, and a spike-like growth has begun at the back of their heads - most likely due to heavy smartphone usage. Terms like „Tik Tok Brain“, „Text Neck“ or „Text Thumb“ emerge. Technological progress has outpaced evolution.
Cyberspace gradually becoming the home of mind leads to degenerating physicality. The weak digital body must be supported in order not to collapse, whilst the digital knows no gravity unless it is applied. EOP shows a meticulously crafted figure embedded in a framework of tubes. So-called “support structures”, used in additive manufacturing to prevent overhanging parts from collapsing in the process of giving the digital a physical form, are scaled up and built in stainless steel tubes. Automatically generated by algorithms, the tubular frameworks resemble structural elements in public infrastructure such as stage elements or transmission towers.
We have become so intertwined with our mobile devices that our brains have begun to hallucinate about our smartphone vibrating or ringing even when it’s not. Yet the human brain itself, while still largely unknown, serves as a model for recent technological efforts in the field of artificial intelligence. Understanding the brain as a kind of cellular machine may be the foundation of recent technological advances, and AI may also be the closest humanity has come to reconstructing the human brain, even if it still lacks consciousness.
In May 2023, an image of an explosion outside the Pentagon went viral. Shared by several accounts on Twitter and Telegram (including Russia‘s state broadcaster Russia Today), it was soon declared by US officials to be a fake image generated by artificial intelligence. The image is supposed to be the first AI-generated image to have had a real impact on the US stock markets, causing stock values to drop temporarily.
realtimeexplosion is a data sculpture that generates fake explosion images of significant buildings around the world in real time. It uses GPT (ChatGPT‘s base model) and Stable Diffusion, with the former randomly generating text prompts that are automatically fed into the image-generating diffusion model to generate an image. The most recent live-generated image is displayed on two screens, while each image is automatically uploaded to a custom website (www.realtimeexplosion.xyz) where it can be downloaded. Thus, each of the output images of the real-time data sculpture bears the risk of being distributed and believed to be real.
The work is intended to be an unsupervised closed circuit of two publicly available AI systems interacting with each other – one creating the thought, the other creating the image. Each image shown on the screen was generated in the very moment the viewer was looking at the previous image. By losing the ability to supervise the generated image, errors appear. For example, because the AI model used is designed to generate hyper-realistic human portraits, human hands may appear on the images. Another common error is the loss of physicality - buildings may appear to be hovering above the ground, or be shown multiple times in a single image. The image archive, which is created fully automatically on the custom website, is therefore also a snapshot of how the AI systems interact - and fail to.
While EOP metaphorically constructs a hypothesis of the post-digital body based on developments observable in our increasingly disposable presence, realtimeexplosion focuses on a current technological development over which we already seem to have lost control due to the pace at which it is occurring.