Presented at the 2024 Mapsion Festival in Eurajoki Finland, denial of labor is a further exploration of the process of “free assemblage” in which the program is created from a database of pre rendered “candidate” images and the sound is likewise assembled from a database of stems. There are extended elements of drawn animation, in which paper templates of the building outline were drawn over by hand to develop animations of the building.
Denial of labor refers specifically to the elements in the work that are produced through the use of A.I. LLMs, reflecting the way in which these models attempt to reify a new mode of production that removes or denies the role of human labor in the production of the image. The activity of assembling this work is based on the selection, processing and arrangement of existing elements that are extracted from the LLM – often in an attempt to subvert or interrogate its natural modes of image production – which in most cases are oriented towards a mode of bland photorealism.
Each of these processes in the new economy of proposed abundance makes use of the past, not only as the raw material to feed the data sets required by LLMs or GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) systems, but unwittingly to define the proper “uses” of image making, that are revealed, as these models progress, to be inherently conservative and based on the trope of photorealism, visual effects, and ironically, cinema, to which they make the most superficial claims to mimic, despite the visually hyperbolic styles of the images that make a claim to this visual equivalence.
While an era of material superabundance is promised through the use of AI technologies, there is no reorganization of social precepts that attend these claims. We are promised an indeterminate benefit while the proximate uses of the technology all speak to the creation of “efficiencies” in the removal of human judgement, discrimination and decision making from (particularly administrative) work.
Thanks to Niko Tiainen for putting on a great festival every year!
Ariel View of the Vuojoki Mansion where the festival was staged
On site recording of the work
denial of labor, 2024