ópera posthumana de gramática sintética (o el enésimo nuevo orden), i

This is a work I did for the Refraction x Tezos @ South Beach Miami during Art Week Miami 2023.

The word opera means "work" in Italian and was first used in the context of musical creation and theatrical performance in the 17th century in Italy. An opera combines many forms of art and performance: singing, acting, dancing, playing instruments, set design, scripting, lighting, etc. As Richard Wagner defined it, it is a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, in that it combines all the arts. As we advance to societies with a greater mix of AI-infused participants and a tighter collaboration between humans and machines, an opera of sorts starts to emerge where a new total model of society spans human-machine relationships in all orders of (so far) human activity. The evolution of human existence will in one way or another be impacted by these new beings that we are creating and releasing in society. While any real impact in terms of biological evolution would take a rather long timespan to be evident, we are subject to a rate of change in the ways we conduct our activities that is rather new and difficult to handle from a deep, philosophical standpoint: is the notion of human and all its characteristics that we take for granted in need of a thorough revision?

To address these questions I have started training AI models in my own human-coded generative systems: Contrapuntos, Entretiempos, Ecologías C and other unreleased projects. All of them propose a search over their own total cognitive space (all the possibilities that they can represent given the rules and parameter ranges I have specified as their creator), seeking to provoke some reaction in the human that consumes them. I also trained an AI model on pictures of my own naked human body. The naked generative and the naked human. I employ these models to prompt a stable diffusion system to depict a group of men and women dancing, performing nude (the raw human again, although interestingly this output came out with no naked bodies, as part of the crossover between the human grammars and the geometrical, generative ones). The AI then uses these models to create a visual representation of my question, therefore using the visual grammar that I have injected with the generative systems, as opposed to using exclusively the visual input that stable diffusion is trained with.

Taking the time to go through the generated images becomes a chance to imagine this new human-machine existence, its rules, its semantics, its own grammar. These will shape whatever new opera, as the total combination of expression possibilities, will emerge from such a new existence.

The original artwork is here.