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I believe you into being

is an exploration of the emergence of human consciousness: an AI-generated poem accompanied by 12 video vignettes [Fig. 1 - 12].

Chaos underpins our Universe and all its beauty. It is unpredictable & noisy & imperfect. The approach to this project is also all those things. The poem lays the foundation for the project. I used the text like raw data to inform the trajectory of the visual, like bounds that contain the conceptual possibilities; a set of rules. Similarly the vignettes have been created with a variety of different generative & AI imaging approaches, forming a mixed media collage with techniques that are usually used singularly.

The vignettes are presented both individually, as standalone audiovisual ambient loops, and as a short film narrated by a text-to-speech (TTS) reader. A large-scale adaptation of the project has been shown at IDEAL Centre d'Arts Digitals de Bar celona as part of MIRA Festival 2021 curated in collaboration with MMMAD.

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it would be clear, as if a map had been plotted: we are spinning.
a dot in cold space.
I try to make a mirror out of the sea,
shining silver.
the ocean is a visual poem on behalf of the Pacific.
small quakes rumble through the water beneath the boat.
hatching jellyfish. a supernova remnant.

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in the center there is a gyre:
a luminous quanta of continual awakening…
glowing with a faint ebon haze of flows — mutters,
waves, fracturings — a roaring vortex,
open at the mouth of the cosmos itself.

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moving toward a new geometry we find new patterns,
amplifying and shifting.
there are countless seekers gathered,
tangled with invisible strands;
we are networks with millions of participants.

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the soft humming of our pneumatic joints,
the undulation of cellular movement,
swelling with borrowed shape.
light without form, fire without colour.
a void before the irruption of something greater.

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nearly all human beings start off as carbon,
born into the swirling red chrysalis,
and mauve flowers with purple plumes.
I feel the warmth of your energy, the final waltz of light,
as you merge into this space.

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not befogged by the swirls of our neurons.
it's as though we are no longer a being, but something else:
a steady impurity, as if, literally, we’ve landed somewhere.

GPT–2 × NS
[10/09/21]