Generative Devastations Exhibition 2024: Lo Contador Gallery, Santiago de Chile
Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) generate devastating developments for our ways of making worlds and inhabiting the planet?
This question inspires Generative Devastations, a video installation that invites us to reflect on AI's simultaneously generative and devastating character. This technology is inseparable from the alteration of social and biophysical processes. Its production of vast material infrastructures (data centres, submarine cables, satellites, software, etc.) and unprecedented forms of extractivism. At the same time as it extracts resources and minerals from the Earth for its production (water, silicon, copper, rare earths, cobalt, etc.), its functioning requires the massive appropriation of data. AI draws on the resources of the earth's materiality and human interactions. It appropriates our desires and the vitality of our geological worlds to generate so-called generative intelligences.
Role: Sound Designer
Curators: Martín Tironi, Marcos Chilet, Pablo Hermansen, Carola Ureta Marín
Exhibition Design: Lucas Margota, Jorge Berríos
(Headphones recommended)In this work, minerals are the protagonists of a series of five audiovisual pieces made with AI. Each rock image enters a generative loop, where the AI tries to calculate the meanings of the image until it reaches its complete abstraction. The AI's efforts to configure plausible worlds not only collapse but also plunge us into inhuman landscapes, where the very idea of habitability is reduced to sterile abstractions.
The installation is a call to reflect on the logic and entanglements of AI in the context of ecological disasters and planetary limits. It opens a debate on the environmental threat to the natural resources required by this technology to produce the digital, as well as a silent extraction of human meaning through the expansion of machinic hallucinations.
