Words that Remake the World

At the exhibition from September 1, 2018 to June 2, 2019

The installation »Words that Remake the World« forms part of Nye Thompson’s ongoing project »The Seeker«, a networked machine entity that travels the world virtually and describes what it sees. Named for Ptah-Seker, the artist/technologist god of Ancient Egypt, who created the world by speaking the words to describe it, this project looks at how the act of describing the world might establish a whole new worldview for machines and humans alike.

The installation comprises a large-scale diagrammatic drawing presented alongside an audiovisual piece and a data spreadsheet showing the source data for the drawing. The latter was created using data collected from The Seeker project; it presents the words that »The Seeker« uses to describe what it sees, and which comprise its conceptual landscape. The drawing represents a process of intense analytical scrutiny of this data by the artist, effectively mapping the nascent AI’s »mind«.

The video shows a performance where the machine worldview is filtered back through human eyes and mouths. In »Words that Remake the World«, Thompson asks herself and the audience how machine vision may come to influence our own vision. Are we relearning how to look at the world based on AI technologies? Where does the balance of power in this transaction actually lie?