Cyborgs for Rebellion (documentation)

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

“Cyborgs for Rebellion“ is an infinitely rotating series of AI-generated, poetry-reading, three-dimensional portraits recently projected over two nights onto an oak tree in a public park in Richmond, Virginia. This park is where enslaved people gathered for Gabriel’s Rebellion 222 years ago. By my calculations, this oak tree was present for this gathering of rebels. I created the portraits with a new system of artificial intelligence that I custom coded and trained on images of Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, John Brown, and other Virginia slave rebellion instigators, as well as robots from America’s most critically acclaimed and top-grossing science fiction films. Each of the poems was generated by another AI I created, that writes poetry based on historical documents like court records that quote the participants of the rebellions, and “Kindred,” Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 novel of time-travel to a slave plantation. Part of the idea behind this project was to take AI that is more typically used for surveillance, control, and the reinforcement of existing societal power structures, and instead to try to teach an AI to imagine a more rebellious, inclusive, freedom-loving future humanity.