Jerry Galle

‘DITTO’ can be understood as a mini network, or even, more megalomanically, as a tiny Internet. Or, it could be perceived as a tiny AI component that tries to compose its identity amidst cascades of explored and gathered (web crawled) opinions, words and images. ‘DITTO’s processing is totally transparent because its motor is hyper communication. The software results endeavour in the illusion that they are free among the decentralized panopticum that is the Internet. ‘DITTO’ is as deliberately transparent as the next contemporary artistic practice or online persona. ‘DITTO’ too, enduringly overcomes its fear to show its private insides, by expressing a desire to flagrantly expose itself. And ‘DITTO’ obscenely stimulates itself with loose movement, purely for acceleration purposes.

From a large collection of texts by or documents related to dead public figures an AI is trained. This trained AI mimics the featured dead person in the form of a chatbot so that we are once again able to have an online conversation with this deceased person. The two public figures that have been processed for now are William Burroughs and Andy Warhol. The project is ongoing, so more ‘deadchats ‘will be put online in the near future. Drop me a line if you think of a dead person that you would really like to chat with.

This piece is an endless online radio play generated with an AI prepared and trained with a large database consisting of texts related to dystopia, apocalypse, the post-human, post-catastrophe survival techniques, artificial intelligence and the Anthropocene. AI, human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the others. The trained AI rethinks the world that climate change has wrought in the form of a radio play. By the way, the title of this project was created by the algorithms themselves.

With this web page it is possible to interview an artificial intelligence software. The interview software was trained with a large database consisting of texts related to dystopia, apocalypse, the post-human, post-catastrophe survival techniques, machine learning and CIA interviewing techniques.
Of course the work refers to Marcel Broodthaers’ ‘Interview with a cat’ (Département des Aigles, 1970). And although the interviewed AI’s replies are a bit more elaborated then the “miiaaw..mm..miauw” in Broodthaers’ transcript, this work likes to reside in the same absurd universe. Besides, the AI replies sometimes make sense, albeit in a very self-reflective, destructive and almost autistic manner. Evidently the algorithms don’t really know what they’re talking about. In that respect the AI’s answers resemble Broodthaers’ cat “miauuws” because we project our own meaning into them.