Page 110 - The Black Box Book

CONCLUSION – ALIEN ARCHIVIST (ALIEN AI)
While usually, the structure of a database or archive is assumed based
on a thorough acquaintance with the material to be organized, in our
project, we did the opposite. The new curator (software) is programmed
so that the structure of the database gradually changes in response to
the expanding and changing content. Also, the output in the form of a set
of image clusters and a visualization map depicting the leitmotifs of our
collective experience of the pandemic will gradually transform with respect
to the interaction of the dataset content with the neural network. This
is thus a fulfilment of the concept of a live archive not only in the sense
of a gradually growing dataset but also in the neural network’s ability to
evolve and, consequently, restructure the arrangement of outputs.
In the introduction, we used a quote in which Gilles Deleuze recalls
Michel Foucault’s accusation of technocratic structuralism. Our curato-
rial experiment suggests that the metaphor of a new Foucaultian-type
archivist can be extended to refer to the use of artificial intelligence in
working with datasets, i.e., the technically supported practice of “structur-
alism without structures,” in the case of the use of neural networks and
the method of learning without supervision. Indeed, an artificial neural
network is just such a flexible structure. Its operational logic can be de-
scribed as moving towards a transgression of the boundaries it perma-
nently sets and overcomes. The resulting composition and assemblage
of images stored in a black box change over time as the territory it maps
evolves and changes (Dreyfus – Rabinow, 1982, 1983).
While artificial neural networks are usually used to test preconceived
theories of art history, epochs, and styles (Spratt, 2018) (Elgammal et al.,
2018), in our project, they were used in an experiment whose aim was not
to verify the validity of generally accepted claims but to discover a new
perspective on art in a global coronavirus pandemic that goes beyond
human experience and existing knowledge. The aim was to bring to life
the inhuman nature of the system, to provoke it to behave unpredictably
and to place the traces of the pandemic in a post-apocalyptic story of
humanity’s demise.
This goal is a critique of the anthropocentrism of the discipline of
artificial intelligence as such. But it is also a rejection of the positivist
ethos that is manifested in the current tendency to use automated pro-
cedures in processing big data in the form of digitized cultural heritage
collections. The software we have created is not an extension of human
senses or cognitive processes in the sense of an artificial imitation
of them. Still, we have attempted to fulfil the concept of non-human
artificial intelligence. The question is whether this process leads only to
the entropy of the system or has the potential to become an instrument
of affirmation of the Other, the non-human, the transcending human, as
part of the world we inhabit.
110
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