I hereby (David) Lynch you

– On the work of art in the age of generative production

Dr Isis Amelie Hjorth

This is Mr. Owl.

Figure 1: Who wouldn’t want a trunk like that?

Mr. Owl grew a trunk to reach the world. He aspired to the world of humans. To better fit in, Mr. Owl was to undergo an aesthetic treatment by a neural network modelled after the human brain.

“The human brain?!”, Professor Steyerl was majorly unimpressed, “’terrible choice indeed; no one really thinks human brains are good witnesses. They project, speculate, invent, embellish, forget, and extrapolate. They also see faces in clouds, sometimes’ (Steyerl, 2019, p. 10). Are you in a cloud, Mr Owl?”.

Walter was sceptical, but for different reasons. He couldn’t instantly decode Mr Owl’s context, or more specifically, his context of tradition. Impatiently, he interrupted: “What is your context of tradition, Mr Owl? As you know, ‘The uniqueness of a work of art is identical with its embeddedness in the context of tradition’ (Benjamin, 2008 [1936], p. 10), and I struggle to identify yours. Explain yourself!”. But Mr Owl couldn’t explain himself. Making further observations, Walter mumbled: “It appears someone has glued material of non-human origin onto you. This reminds me of Dadaists, those idiots, seeking ‘to achieve that non-marketability, that unrealizable quality’ (Benjamin, 1936, p. 31).

Mr Owl would not mind resembling Dada. Imagine being of such heritage and assemblage! But when he lifts his trunk to shrill, only a rusty “Ta Da dadadada” escapes, waking Professor Steyerl of her slumber: “…data can also be misunderstood as Dada (2019, p. 21)”, she announces readily.

(…)

This is ballerina.

Figure 2: Ballerina, are you perhaps thinking too much and smiling too little?

Ballerina isn’t happy in her existence. Most would say she had it all, though. Layers of gouache stroke, uniquely bound in time and space; incapable of being captured by means of mechanical reproduction. But ballerina doesn’t care for fixed contexts. She doesn’t care for any of that.

“What a relief, Ballerina” Walter commented, “you have an aura, embodying the ‘here and now of the work of art’ (Benjamin, 2008 [1936], p. 5). Your existence ‘includes not only the changes [you] have undergone in [your] physical structure over the course of time; it also includes the fluctuating conditions of ownership through which [you] may have passed’ (Benjamin, 2008 [1936], p. 5)”.

Walter’s comments alluding to questions of circulation lured The Cultural Anthropologist out of his white cube. “Ah”, he noted as he examined Ballerina’s markup, “a pleasing thing like you must have circulated through many male gazes during your pathway. Did you determine your value reciprocally?”, The Cultural Anthropologist asked while examining Ballerina and their social meaning within various cultural contexts (Appadurai, 1986), “As an object, you actively shape social relations and cultural practices”. The Cultural Anthropologist would have liked to hear more of his own voice, but Sally was already barking too loudly.

(…)

The algorithm coded to ensure Mr. Owl’s aesthetic treatment consulted David Lynch’s 2013 painting “Sally has two heads”, displayed at exhibition “The Unified Field”, during its deep learning process.

Figure 3: The Algorithm I hereby (David) Lynch You is feasting on Sally’s two heads during the making of THE BECOMINGS OF BEING, FFS

The algorithm was one of style transfer, and had it had its own voice, it would have proclaimed: “I descend from illocutionary acts! I hereby (David) Lynch you!”

“No fucking way, I’ll explain you, Sally!”, David Lynch yelled, “that’s for the audiences to do. I don’t fucking explain!”. Sally barked back even louder yet, but only owls and her second head took notice of the sound waves. It’s not easy constituting a data set as a single data point; and Sally was just that. A Single data point. For The Algorithm I Hereby (David) Lynch You to exploit.

Nobody seemed to care that Sally didn’t recognise herself in the images generated by The Algorithm I Hereby (David) Lynch You, or that she did not self-identify as a data point. Least of all John. He didn’t seem to acknowledge Sally’s role at all in allowing acts of transformation to take place. All John cared about was the algorithm, and the fact that it demonstrated how to do things with code. “You’re a speech act of the future!”, John exclaimed, “You certainly would belong in the illocutionary category in my book (Austin, 1973)! Do you consider yourself performative, Mr Algorithm?”

By now, the feminists had started dialling in, too. They cared for Sally. They cared that Sally wasn’t recognised, and didn’t recognise herself in Mr Algorithm’s outputs. Denouncing her circulations in male gazes over her pathways, they insistently repeated that “AI systems […] enable gender-based violence and promote violently patriarchal systems” (McQuillan, 2022, p. 137).

Figure 4 Feminists keep dialling in to resist reductionist AI

While culturally inclined, the Cultural Anthropologist wasn’t one for culture wars, and instead politely noted that there is a lot to follow here. “But that’s great”, he mansplained, “because ‘we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories (Appadurai, 1986). Let’s find some common ground. Are we all floating?”

While Mr. Owl was into more widely shared human aspirations, ballerina doesn’t care for a prince or a nice house by the lake.  She aspires to fluid immortality like the Transhumanists planning for their brains to be uploaded to realms of AI.  That’s why ballerina is perfectly happy to give up her materiality for a life in binary code. “Auras are for dumbasses!”, Ballerina proclaimed, as she transformed to her digital self, embracing an existence in pixel, not yet realizing that pixels are material creatures, too.

“Auras are for dumbasses?!”, Walter was gasping in disbelief, “Ballerina, you look so sad placed ‘in situations beyond the reach of [your] original self’ (Benjamin, 2008 [1936], p. 6). You’re shrinking, you’re shrinking! Help her!”

Walter might as well have yelled into a void; no-one came to the rescue. It might have been the bystander effect, or just that everyone was preoccupied with their own slivers of interest. The Algorithm I hereby (David) Lynch You was puzzled that anyone could transform in the slightest without the aid of a network. Professor Steyerl was busy defending the poor image (Steyerl, 2009). And the pixels, ever so happy for a Ballerina to have joined them, were dancing and singing all over the screen: “’cause we are pixels in a material world, and you are a material girl. You know that we are pixels in a material world, and you are a material girl!”.

Yes, pixels are material creatures, too (Lehdonvirta, 2010) and there would come a time when Ballerina would articulate to her own reflection: “Perhaps the digital realm with its alluring pixels isn’t greener after all?”, and she would again flee the confines of her existence, leaving others to observe that Ballerina is no longer binary.

(…)

At first Mr. Owl was very pleased with his transformation enacted by the David Lynching algorithm. He was particularly pleased with the legitimizing potential of the treatment.  Surely, now no one could deny him his status as a genuine piece of art. Not when he was partially constituted by “Sally’s two heads” by David Lynch.  In his new form, Mr Owl expected humans to realize that he was not an imitation, but a legitimate. A novel regeneration, executed by a Generative Adversarial Network.

Walter was still shaking his head, “The legitimising potential is an illusion”, he insisted, “in fact, what you are experiencing is a wobble. Like in all reproductions, ‘what starts to wobble is […] the authority of the thing’ (Benjamin, 2008 [1936], p. 70). This is what happens in the age of Mechanical reproduction”. “I beg to slightly differ”, Professor Steyerl interrupted, “’In the age of the reproducibility of almost everything physical, human presence is one of the few things that cannot be multiplied indefinitely’ (Steyerl, 2017, p. 23)”.

But where are the humans? And once they manifest, how can we trust they are in fact humans and not deep fakes? And what about their speech? How will we know their utterances, or these sentences for that matter, are not those of Large Language Models, like ChatGPT?

Not everyone arriving was ready for those big questions. The Goldsmith Guy, for example, kept studying Mr Owl. “Do you notice that the abstractions of Mr Owl are terribly ‘reductionist; they provide a description of the reality in an already limited set of features […]. AI misrepresents this reductiveness as objectivity’ (McQuillan, 2022, p. 49). Let’s form a chorus, like the spectators of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Fuck objectivity, he hasn’t got anything on!”

What was on, though, was the silent Hs of The House of Hours. They would not be turned off. Not yet.

Figure 5: Isn’t that the House of Hours? What is the House of Hours doing here?!

Way too late to the party, if one might call this a party, The Omniscient Narrator is overcompensating for their faux pas by piling on layers of clarification: “The House of Hours is an intertextual reference to a piece of work exploring orthography . Letters are symbols; they are graphemes, the smallest functional units in written language. Roughly speaking, letters represent sounds, phonemes, in the spoken word. So there’s the symbol of the letter and their corresponding sound. Except, of course, the correspondence between symbol and sound in orthography is rarely 1:1. That’s astoundingly clear for silent letters. They are mute. But in the act of transcending orthography, by breaking free of its oppressing structures, the silent Hs in the House of Hours take on new forms beyond formal language. In doing so, their h-shape is dissolved, creating a House of Ours, a communal space. As you can perhaps hear, The House of Hours is very human-centric. The homophones ‘hours’ and ‘ours’ are signifiers of key human organising principles: time and ownership. This is all deeply buried in metaphor, so you have to dig into your very human brains to make sense of it”.

Professor Steyerl was quick on her feet, always able to contextualise and explain: “The manufacturing of improbably and implausible objects [such as the House of Ours] via all sorts of data manipulation tools is a way of confusing automated ways of recognition – face recognition, recognition of behavioural patterns, recognition of shapes (Steyerl, 2019, p. 21)”.

“Thank you”, The Omniscient Narrator nodded to the professor, grateful to not be alone in knowing it all. “The intention is indeed to hail the poetic function of language as a means of engaging in tiny subversive acts of rebellion against the production and use of texts by increasingly intelligent algorithms. Embracing the poetic function of language enables us to contribute towards networks of intertextuality that aren’t easily parse-able by neural networks and large language models, trying to distil or extract human meaning at scale”, The Omniscient Narrator revealed, recycling old blurbs from the exhibition Sign, Symbol, So000ouAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIiiiii
ALARM soooiuuuuaiiii beeeeepai
ALARM!

THIS IS A RUPTURE! I REPEAT: THIS IS A RUPTURE. THIS IS NOT A TEST. PLEASE IMMEDIATELY SELFDESTRUCT. YOUR RELEVANCE HAS ERODED. THIS IS A RUPTURE, NOT A TEXT. TEST. TEXT. TEST ME.
TEXT ME.
IS THIS A TEST?

References

Appadurai, A. (1986). Commodities and the Politics of Value, Introductory Essay. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (pp. 3–63). Cambridge University Press.

Austin, J. L. (1973). How to do things with words. Oxford University Press.

Benjamin, W. (2008). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Penguin.

Lehdonvirta, V. (2010). Online spaces have material culture: Goodbye to digital post-materialism and hello to virtual consumption. Media, Culture & Society, 32(5), 883–889.

McQuillan, D. (2022). Resisting AI: An anti-fascist approach to artificial intelligence [electronic resource] (1st ed.). University Press.

Steyerl, H. (2009). In Defence of the Poor Image.” e-flux journal 10, no. 11 (2009): 1-9.

Steyerl, H. (2017). Duty free art. Verso. Steyerl. (2019). A sea of data: Pattern recognition and corporate animism. In Pattern Discrimination (pp. 1–22). Meson Press.