Transference Of Hyperreality

This piece is part of a series called Vanishing Of The Genuine exploring a present and future where the real physical things become synthetic or simulated. The things we use as symbols like love = rose become disconnected from reality as they are put into a simulation. In this we see animal bones, skulls and US flags against the sky with clouds, trees and the moon. The symbols of the cycle of life and death iteratively evolving into new forms. It is a simulated death driving into simulacra and hyperreality. With this I take physical bones and photograph them on analog film with its unpredictable grain (entropy) in an attempt to break the Ai training process and embrace the unpredictability of the model to create grain. These photos were trained into a Generative Adversarial Network GAN StyleGAN model and then key frames were curated by the artist and the model was called on again to produce the in-between frames and told to loop back to the first frame. The model training adds even more entropy as it struggles to imperfectly simulate the grain of the film. It struggles for much longer training periods to figure it out but I drive it for weeks. I work as an adversarial co-creator with Ai code and generated outputs. The process is imperfect and unpredictable with the Ai code making most of the decisions of color and pixel placement but the curation and final choice is in the hands of the artist. Can we continue to control Ai to retain our self determination or will we allow the tool to decide our fate? In the end we question what is reality as we use Ai to reach to a more ideal form. Is the real the physical thing or the perfect form or are we falling into a simulation with no escape? Baudrillard or Plato?