Language in AI Art: Encoding, Folding and Transforming
(2025)
author(s): Garrett Lynch IRL
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
This article discusses four artworks that employ artificial intelligence (AI) as practice as research (PaR) by artist Garrett Lynch IRL. These are: I’m not Garrett Lynch IRL – DoppelGANger Portraits (2021), a series of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) portraits; TheLastStraw (2021–23), a performative generative artwork for social media; Flag for States of Damage (2018), a performative mixed-reality artwork for the web and The Traveller (2024), a four-channel video installation with artefacts.
The objective of the works is two-fold. Firstly, each artwork’s use of AI is distinct yet is intended to form part of a broad ongoing exploration of how networks can be transformative to art practice. The works maintain that AI is a form of network that enables emergence. Not the emergence of intelligence as defined in the field of AI, but instead in the context of art theory a manner in which artworks are expanded, extended or activated beyond their artist/author defined forms. AI as a network is therefore defined as both the generative adversarial network, the input, employed in the formation of the work and the resulting network of artist, artwork and audience that emerges when a work is expanded, extended or activated. Secondly, instrumental in facilitating AI as a network is the use of language as a combined form of encoding and performative utterance (Austin, 2018). Building on a fundamental basis of computing that all digital media is reducible to language, code, and numbers as well as a basis of communication theory that language is a social construct, the works explore language as both form of representation and communication between human and machine. Language enables a process of folding (O’Sullivan, 2005) or flipping (Sloan, 2012) of concepts, media and artefacts between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ spaces, between digital and materialised forms.
Fragments in Time
(2022)
author(s): Tobias Leibetseder, Thomas Grill, almut schilling, Till Bovermann
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The processual sculpture "Fragments" is in permanent development and consists of artefacts of the "Rottings Sounds" project of artistic research*. Waste, things collected, things stored and things put aside, texts, pictures, data, sounds etc. are the basis of the shape-changing work. It is located at the Auditorium of Rotting Sounds. For this exposition, media representations of physical fragments have been arranged, then subjected to multiple stages of erosion processes specific to digital data. Object or exhibition, museum or archive, collection or documentation are moments of intrinsic research and decomposition, accompanying the process and resting in the distant but immediate eye of the virtual observer.
*"Rotting Sounds – Embracing the temporal deterioration of digital audio" is a cooperation of the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. It is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) as project AR445-G24.