Algorithmic processes that make the structure of our digital reality are recurrently masked under soothing interfaces, mimicking human form. What we identify as the internet can dissolve into uncanny constructs when questioning the control people have over what lurks underneath congenial interactions. This project starts from my search for a technological bridge between the analogue and the digital realm.
The Entropist extends this bridge into a fully digitised territory. It contextualises the fear of losing control over our digital personas towards an abstract, non-anthropomorphic surveillance technology. It is built as a two-sided, reversed-control scenario with me giving artistic control to both AI and the public, the latter being a willing yet unaware collaborator, offering visual data as they gesture casually with their hands.
The final participatory installation embodies an exposed computer vision AI and a camera recording within a tower-like structure. The hand-recognition AI aesthetically manipulates and combines the images collected from the visitors into a computer-generated video. A unique key is computed via cryptographic hashes for each participant, an inviolable certification of the place they have in the final video-output, a place on a human-chain akin to a blockchain. The space is filled with the sounds of the AI thinking process, soundscape developed from weights calculated by the neural network, under Catalin Cretu’s supervision.
The inability to comprehend what is behind the gathering and processing of our information drives anxiety. The Entropist confronts our thoughts and fears by revealing the tech creature into a physical world, forcing us to question our individual privacy and control over this creature, about which we know significantly less than it knows of us.
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The Entropist is part of the project The Somatist, the Entropist & the Skeptic, initiated alongside bioartist Floriama Candea and Qolony, , with support from INCD Materials Physics Măgurele, VAGon – in(ter)disciplined space and AFCN – Administration of the National Cultural Fund.
