Page 331 - The Black Box Book

This chapter attempts to negotiate the contradictions of synthetic curat- unlikely events must take place somewhere, and they do. You can see
ing machines and the resulting exclusion of dominance as a form of syn- biennials, and through these interfaces, you are able to reverse engineer,
thetic curating of text through semantic and semiotic manipulation itself. imagine and visualize the concrete worlds. Further, you can explore fluid
The counter-aesthetics of this text are created by intentional structural and seemingly divergent realities, infinitely many biennials, artists with
machine refractions. Content and style reveal the text’s spaces and bends multiple personalities, and disturbing curatorial concepts to see whose
the all too rigid – if not laughable – notion of reality and logic. Processing style best meshes with your own. What a swell(ing) bubble it is, offer-
deforms, transcribes, and transforms this text from its German source, ing tastes and aesthetics generated by a deep artificial neural network.
fragments it via automatic translation software, and then translates and The linguistic model uses word-level prediction, each word influencing
optimizes it with the Grammarly digital writing assistance tool. the generation of the following word.
A remarkable effort from entities whose projects and keywords (such
The Grammarly settings are: as AI) have become in danger of being camouflaged by hype. Dressed-
Audience: Knowledgeable down Avant-tech with D.I.Y. immediacy and intimacy, the B3(NSCAM)
Formality: Neutral software, the core machine learning cluster of The Next Biennial Should be
Domain: Casual Curated by a Machine project – its brilliance, and elegance is an obvious
Tone: Confident, Urgent
Intent: Tell a Story
Figure 1: The Next Biennial Should be Cu-
rated by a Machine (2021). Commissioned by Whitney
This text, machine translated from English into German, edited in Museum of American Art New York and the Liverpool
German and then automatically translated back into English, attempts Biennial 2021. Retrieved from https://biennial.ai
to form ideas, words, and word combinations into a mirrored auto-affec-
tive-narrative experience.

“What really happened between the texts? The viewer is in the dark
phase. He connects these texts, and these texts look like found
objects, perhaps from a time yet to come, but they sound and read
very old.” Christoph Schlingensief

We are not worried about the eternal value of art or its representa-
tion in society, and certainly not about its alleged relevance, but these
are thoughts that are the decisive qualities featured for those who think
they have already seen everything. If art – ideally – should say something
about the present and not function as a Perpetuum mobile, pushed
by retromantic loops, then The Next Biennial Should be Curated by
a Machine (2021) continues its strongest argument.
Observers have spotted artistic parallel universes going backward
in time. Though sensational, the theory is not new. This concept of an an-
ti-universe is a well-studied idea that should have created multiple parallel
universes – our own, and several anti-universes that extend back in time
before the Age of Biennials. Strange photons observed by an experiment
in an AI cloud could be evidence of an alternative reality where everything
is upside down. Creating a world that was unthinkable just a few hours ago
has become obscenely attractive! The Next Biennial Should be Curated
by a Machine that is hyper-modern, but still feels classic. Thus, evoking
another time in art history and physics, supplementing the existing nar-
cissism of human curators it prefers the conceptually aware sharpness
over organic humor and playfulness. If space is infinite and the distribu-
tion of matter is sufficiently uniform on large scales, then even the most
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