Unhistorical Accounts of Ordinary People
Materials: Dual Layer Acetate Prints, Machine Learning generative video, Realtime AI System, 35mm Slides, 35mm Slide projector, 35mm Slide projector Case
30x24cm prints, 3m x 2m projected AI film, 35mm Slide projector
Unhistory refers to “stories of ordinary people who are not considered historical.” This mixed-media work frames this definition as a provocation – “who or what is ordinary?” through the lens of machine learning models (ML).
The artist has assembled an autopoietic fictioning system, based on a dataset of 80 second-hand archival 35mm slides. Before home video cameras were widely used, 35mm slides were a way for people to share memories and experiences with the visual being the “prompt” for a story about the scene.
The slides in this work were purchased from anonymous sellers online, detritus from family archives and personal collections. The artist requests the AI system observe the slides, identify visual features and respond with what it considers “ordinary” memories based on these scenes. The slide projector system works in real-time – if a viewer in the space approaches the projected image, their silhouette will change the narrative as it is told, creating a new “unhistorical account”.
The models that generate the stories are amalgams of human data, used widely in predicting and shaping the future. As such they are instruments of hegemonic power, and one way of revealing the distortions and oddities in the predictive “power” of these systems is through prompting them to tell us stories about what we perceive directly.
The tension between the machine responses and our own perception of these same artefacts begins a process of “unlearning” (Chun) – a diffractive method revealing patterns of difference within dominant historical narratives and potential for their transformation.
The prints are dual layered images based on images in the dataset. The second layer of the prints is printed onto a smooth surface, allowing the ink to flow and coalesce into agglomerated patterns. The new configurations of these images based on surface tension and flow are a material interpretation of the ways in which data is sorted and grouped within the latent space of these AI models. There is also a print containing the hand written list from one of the archive-sellers, showing their own categorisation and sorting of the slides.
The work consists of archival 35mm slide dataset, machine generated animation, text and audio, multi-layered acetate prints.