“Language has been given to [people] so that [they] may make Surrealist use of it.”

Andre Breton, Surrealist Manifesto, 1924.

One hundred years ago in the wake of the First World War, a group of artists coalesced in Paris seeking a free and unencumbered access to the
imagination and subconscious. Under the name “Surrealists,” these artists used exercises in dream analysis and free association to guide their arts practice. In one such exercise called Exquisite Corpse, participants would make a drawing on a piece of paper guided by their subconscious, then fold the paper to hide their sketch and pass it to another artist who would continue the “automatic” drawing. Unfolded to reveal the composite drawing, Exquisite Corpse was not only a collaboration between artists, but with chance, serendipity, and happenstance.

Today, OpenAI’s image generation platform DALL-E2 takes its namesake from the the most popularly recognized artist associated with Surrealism:
Salvador Dali. DALL-E2 and other AI image generators are built on a diffusion model– a type of generative model trained on large collections of image data that obscures images with noise, then attempts to recover image data by learning to reverse the process. Much like the Surrealists who took the diffuse data of their own dreams and reassembled them into uncanny and haunting works of art, DALL-E2 uses its diffusion model to generate original images based on text prompts supplied by users.

Artificial Intelligentsia invites the creative writers at the helm of Northwestern’s literary magazine Helicon to engage in their own version of Exquisite Corpse with DALL-E2. Exchanging prose, prompts, and images to create new works, our participating writers explore the advantages, surprises, pitfalls, and challenges of AI image generation as a creative tool of the future.

A short, if rough, reflection of cultural violence, deep time, and mineralization resulting from a 2022 summer intensive in Madrid, Spain.

For 2022, I acted as co-chair of the Symposium committee, organizing around the central theme of Making Space. More information about the Symposium and our program of speakers can be found at the link above.

Whale Game – A Proposal is a cursory exploration of interspecies empathies, linguistics, and objecthood through the logics of video game mechanics and world building. Click here or on the image for more information.

A Material Collapse That is Construction is a 30-minute audio experience situated around Crown Hall at IIT in Bronzeville, Chicago. The project strives to explore the complicated and layered history of the site through the building that preceded the campus—The Mecca Apartments. Affectionately known as “The Mecca Flats” or simply “The Mecca,” the building was a hub of Black culture and life in Bronzeville for nearly half a century. When the Mecca was demolished in 1951 to clear the way for IIT’s campus expansion, it signaled the loss of a historic community. Through poetry, soundscapes, music, and critical analysis, A Material Collapse That is Construction proposes deeper reflection on the legacy of this site, and its implications for socio-spatial politics in the city. Participants can either visit Crown Hall and move through the experience using their location data, or click through the map from home.

Click the image above to visit the site.

“The messiness of history is the harbinger of abstraction. Whatever narratives do not fit the master plan are diminished, rewritten, or entirely lost, abstracted to the point of unrecognizability.”