theblackshit

[theblackshit]

Psychedelic dreams, oddly-fingered hands, plausible yet disturbing alternative realities – generative AI systems have finally unleashed the weird. But, in the process, haven’t they also normalized it? As a result, what we once considered weird is no longer so; instead, it has become a specific expression of classic kitsch. Let’s call it normie weird. If that’s the case, what happened to the real thing, what we could call weirdo weird, then? When one of the world’s leading tech companies releases a tool that produces crazy images reminiscent of a Max Ernst painting, something feels really strange. It’s not the images themselves, which we keep calling ‘surreal’ to bring them back to something known and therefore reassuring. Instead, what’s truly weird might be cloaked in derivative, pictorial, and ultimately visual aesthetics. The non-human core of a sprawling statistical entity could be lurking beneath a superficial layer of cute illustrations. This perspective confronts us with a haunting realization – that humanity itself is a kind of deep kitsch, and art, its greatest achievement, nothing but a shiny souvenir.

Transcript of a talk given at the Hidden Layers conference on the 14th of June, 2024. The conference took place at the Köln International School of Design and was organized by Prof. Dr. Lasse Scherffig, Matthias Grund, Jakob Kilian & Dzennifer Zachlod.

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Nihaal Faizal: Your work Breaking the Screen (2020) is part video essay, part corporate presentation, but mainly I see it as an artist's statement. It charts the ground for a lot of what your practice has taken as a subject over the last eight years. Loosely, this has been the history of computers, which started, as this work states: “as a woman that computes, to being a large machine, then a small machine, and now is more an idea - a construct which holds many others." What brought you to the computer? Anisha Baid: That’s really interesting, I don’t think I have thought about the work being an artist statement exactly but you’re not wrong. In making that work, I was contending with the degree of narrative the video essay needed, and how much it could just be a slideshow of these clip art images of women smashing computers that I had been collecting for months. I found the narrative threads in a corporate presentation template I ended up using as a formal structure for the work—which included introductions and credit slides. Essentially I was making a pitch—for and about womanhood and computerhood. My thesis as such, was not that being a woman on the computer is somehow fundamentally different, or that digital experience is particularly gendered—but that the history of gendered labor and performativity had a lot to offer us in understanding our unfolding relationship with computers. I remember reading Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre, during this time, where she foregrounds the theatrical capacity and action oriented set-up of the computer as a medium. I also drew a lot from a brilliant Human Computer Interaction (HCI) studies paper written by Sheryl Brahnam, Marianthe Karanikas, and Margaret Weave that outlined how HCI as an academic and industrial discipline was born from a feminized conception of the computer—that the “interface,” has always been feminine.

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https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/mdesign.html#/interactive/ballistic/2020%20VV

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Art World Nepotism