Things They Don’t In Florida
AI-Augmented Browser-Based Experience
This part of Mårten Spångberg’s contribution to the Nanaimo/Nordic collaboration one day showed up completely out of the blue. Happy go lucky perhaps or the contingent result of research, study, doubt and deliberately getting lost. It’s rare with projects that allow for the form of rigor required for those moment when something emerges without reason or when intuition is given space to play properly. Ideas that one, a person, can have is predictable and projected whereas the ones that emerge from nowhere, without premonition are not just inpredictable and non-mediated but often rather irritating and difficult to get rid of. They set are unsettling.
It’s fascinating to note how ideas one can have implicitly and inevitably confirm the personhood of the individual and how the other kind, ideas that emerge, is like finding something in the pocket that you absolutely can’t remember or locate in time or space. You know it’s yours, after all it’s your pocket, but it’s simultaneously generating a distance between how you perceive yourself and how you perceive the world. It’s almost like becoming anonymous to oneself, not in the sense of being erased but perhaps like being filterless or self-referential.
You hear a text spoken by a digitally generated voice. The sounds or words produced by the voice is recognized by an app that transforms it to text. The text, in real time, is sent to a third app that correlate words, combinations, pauses, intonations, rhythms etc. in the text to prompts that set-in motion commands that activate certain behaviour, through different means, visible and experienceable through a web browser. The result is not a series of web searchers nor a film but a text-based fiction accompanied by an audio-visual experience, that due to the prompts composition, constructions, search histories etc. are different each time.
If an algorithm, as for example Matteo Pasquinelli proposes, is a step-by-step instruction it’s not difficult to consider choreography an algorithm-based practice. What appears on the screen is not a series of determined or linearly progressing images like in a film but a choreographic practice that set-in motion the appearance of visual and other representations. Those representations are authorized but not confirms or chosen by the “author” or coding team. They requite rigour and subtle skillsets but circumvent non-standard aesthetics and opens up for contingently other modes of appreciation. Implicitly it’s an aesthetic that stumble on consistency and instead shows up, that are contingent to its origin.
The project is currently in a pilot phase and will be developed further to premiere during the Ob/scene festival in Seoul in November 2024. The project’s development can be followed here.
The project is developed in collaboration with Samuel Cordoso, Guillaume Auber and Medium Sans.
Links will be available shortly.
