The result of a collaboration with teens in NYC, this work offers a glitchy reflection on data, algorithms, how young people worry and joke about AI, and the endless production of AI slop.
Installation, 2024
Digital print and folding chair, 11 inches by 18 feet.
The text in the installation was generated by a Markov chain model built on chat histories collected from the Whose AI? workshops.
Shown at Re-Fest: Re-Collect, CultureHub, and Protocols for Opacity, The Art Gallery at Brooklyn College
As part of the Whose AI? workshop series, young participants, aged 14-20, engaged in a series of anonymous chats discussing AI and other topics. The conversations were loose, fragmented, and full of energy. The artist later collected the chat logs and used a Markov chain to generate one thousand remixed sentences based on the probabilities in the original text. Each line begins with the seed word “ai.”
The resulting collective nonsense offers a cryptic, chaotic, yet occasionally insightful look into the teens’ thoughts on technology and society, revealing an underlying theme of digital noise, distrust in power, and the absurdity of contemporary existence.
The Markov chain is an early mathematical model used for prediction. While not nearly as sophisticated as today’s Large Language Models (LLMs), it is thought to have inspired the development of contemporary predictive AI models.
A prediction model could generate content forever, but the further it goes, the more meaning dissolves, much like scrolling endlessly through conversations after conversations, comments after comments, where sense fades in and out of randomness.
