Die Gestalten
Pair Project - Max Park and Daniel BrandtPark & Brandt’s “Die Gestalten” series were conceived of in response to a client’s request for alternatives to a currently more conventional discourse of how AI can expand our understanding of the world and of our place within it. This research project culminated in the fabrication of 3 interactive artefacts with accompanying video.
The viewer is enticed to construct their own narrative of what their work is attempting to communicate. Widely-recognised tropes of Faustian bargains, Orwellian futures, Surveillance Capitalism, episteme and Foucalt, translation and Walter Benjamin or the Global Village envisaged by McLuhan provide some of the context.
There are also other rather more niche references which can be found through additional cultural artefacts and conveyors of meaning, hidden within a banal sequence of events that feature wider themes of trust, privacy, autonomy, power and ambiguity in humans’ relationship with emerging AI technology.
Taken as a whole, these three networked products symbolize an exponentially increasing number and variety of data-collecting sensors; available then for harvesting and distributing as the food necessary to feed AI.
Park & Brandt’s work demonstrates an ambition to tilt the direction of the discourse to bring greater emphasis and awareness of this new environment that AI creates and how it should be comprehended.
The sights, sounds and aromas portrayed in the film complement the products in illustrating how humans have historically gained and fashioned their knowledge and understanding, as well as sought enjoyment through music, for instance, from the ‘dancing data’ of their world.