Installation

By Eduard Escoffet

Presented at: Exhibition “AI: Artificial Intelligence” at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB).
October 18, 2023 — March 17, 2024

Description: The installation proposes a reflection on the fears and epiphanies of AI. News about AI read by a synthetic model of the poet’s voice is integrated into a score that addresses the mineral basis of AI (geological time), the discoveries and global standards that have made it possible (historical time) and the incongruous sound of voices in the present, to which real breaths and vocalizations are added.

The title of the piece refers to the repetitive aspect of AI and the divine character we attribute to it. As evidenced by the text of Baltasar Gracián that presides over the shrine, we tend to think that we are at the end of time, but often the present does not allow us to understand the present.

Technical description: Axolot carried out programming tasks (news scraping, natural language processing and markov chains), variational inference and transformer-based voice cloning, and channel specialization and synchronization.

Collaborators: Julia Múgica, Roger Pibernat and Iván Paz.

With the support of: Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC) and Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB). Project financed with the support and collaboration of FECYT – Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology – Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities.

Web of the exhibition: https://www.cccb.org/es/exposiciones/ficha/ia-inteligencia-artificial/240941

Photo credits: Diego Olmo