In an era defined by technological expansion, the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros illustrates the perpetual cycle of data consumption and regeneration in digital landscapes, elucidating the intricate interplay within complex systems and encapsulating renewal, eternal recurrence, and self-sufficiency amidst the relentless flow of digital information. With the interactive work, Ouroboros Klein, K-Allado McDowell explores the possibilities of oracular narration and its association with AI-generated images and time. As in a kaleidoscopic journey or divinatory consultation, users are invited to pull out a card in sequence or randomly, shuffle the deck, and connect the imagery’s visual inputs with the intense narrative. Confusing the realm of humans and machines, the work plays with these constructs while offering new imaginary landscapes.
Through Allado-McDowell’s words:
In our age of AI, creativity is pressed beneath the weight of the great bell curve, by the endless streams that train both humans and machines. After each break into novelty, the human-AI image world is overrun by the average, the mid, by statistical goo. Constrained by a feed whose peak is everywhere and whose long tail is nowhere, art chomps down on its own appendage, seeking release and spinning faster. Every exit leads back to an entrance. How to break the machine? How to crack the egg? Media are neural now: they watch, they speak back. They camouflage themselves in our minds. We become paranoid after them, finding patterns and defining noise. We must not drown. Instead let us dance in dimensional space, making a voice of broken vectors.
K ALLADO-MCDOWELL is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the book Pharmako-AI, and are co-editor, with Ben Vickers, of The Atlas of Anomalous AI. They record and release music under the name Qenric. Allado-McDowell established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.