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syahrul anuar
Image-making In the 21st Century
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Repository on my rethinking and re-angling of the concept of image-making not as a purely factual or indexical method but one that should instead focus on the 'if' rather than the 'what'.

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And in the latent space, there is semantic content that has meaning for the human eye and mind, and this resonates. After all, what is at issue is the meaning that we give to data. It is impossible to control or foresee the latent space, because it is a space of the unknown and unseen, of an accumulation of visual epistemologies or knowledge systems. The abstraction of the output allows us to contemplate the images and their language as a form of visual memory not limited to the input objects—a memory that transcends them, and which is able to generate new memory objects; the potentiality of an archive of infinite abundance. Through GANs, one generates new materialities, which rise to the surface as the affective qualities of the original in a post-original form.

“The images I present are often infinite in their compositional form and conception. They resist the frame and are often depicted as segments taken out of the potentiality of an endless composition that can be repeated in an endless series of mirrorings, pulling the image into a vertiginous mise en abîme … For Mesopotamia, the place from which we have the earliest textual and archaeological evidence about concepts of the image and aesthetics, I make the case that images had a diachronic presence; they were seen as objects that transcend time and that carry or embody traces of time itself. ”{7}

A visual museum database contains images of original artifacts that can be used to train any Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The input images of these databases are carrying time and memory themselves, such as patina or broken pieces. Of course, the AI doesn’t see a single image, but numbers only. This is a new form of image-making, with a latent space for new synthetic images that the neural network is opening up.

The Trouble with DALL-E - Outland
The Trouble with DALL-E - Outland

DALL·E represents a shift from attempts to reflect objective reality to subjective play. Language is the lens by which we reveal the objective reality known to the neural network being explored. It is a latent(hidden) camera, uncovering snapshots of a vast and complex latent space.

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