AI and Generative Medieval Fictions
Submission Type
Paper
Start Date/Time (EDT)
19-7-2024 10:30 AM
End Date/Time (EDT)
19-7-2024 11:30 AM
Location
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Abstract
“The Gross Gloss” is a contemporary artist’s book that parallels medieval culture with contemporary experience. Inspired by medieval literature and art, the book engages with socioeconomic power dynamics by exploring similarities between the technology industry and feudalism. Maximalist aesthetics guides the project by encompassing manuscript, print, and hypertext iterations.
This artwork plays with the perception of media objects and temporal distance by engaging with video, illustrations, and fictional media archaeology. Through visual techniques and fictional narratives, our contemporary moment is repositioned into a historical one, where an algorithmically informed understanding of the world becomes a worldview similar to medieval Europe’s conceptualization of reality as through the Western philosophical canon: the algorithm becomes a universal, unchallenged narrative, and the “computer wizard” idiomatic expression becomes reified through techno-mysticism.
The work also makes use of medievalisms as received by artificial intelligence algorithms. The last chapter of the book is generated by GPT-2, the precursor to Chat-GPT, after being trained on the preceding chapters and a corpus of literature including medieval works. Illustrations for the book were made with Midjourney, a popular image-generation AI, by asking the AI to recreate artist-made images in “the style of a 1450s European illuminated manuscript”.
Recommended Citation
Perry, Alan, "AI and Generative Medieval Fictions" (2024). ELO (un)linked 2024. 37.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2024/algorithmsandimaginaries/schedule/37
AI and Generative Medieval Fictions
Algorithms & Imaginaries
“The Gross Gloss” is a contemporary artist’s book that parallels medieval culture with contemporary experience. Inspired by medieval literature and art, the book engages with socioeconomic power dynamics by exploring similarities between the technology industry and feudalism. Maximalist aesthetics guides the project by encompassing manuscript, print, and hypertext iterations.
This artwork plays with the perception of media objects and temporal distance by engaging with video, illustrations, and fictional media archaeology. Through visual techniques and fictional narratives, our contemporary moment is repositioned into a historical one, where an algorithmically informed understanding of the world becomes a worldview similar to medieval Europe’s conceptualization of reality as through the Western philosophical canon: the algorithm becomes a universal, unchallenged narrative, and the “computer wizard” idiomatic expression becomes reified through techno-mysticism.
The work also makes use of medievalisms as received by artificial intelligence algorithms. The last chapter of the book is generated by GPT-2, the precursor to Chat-GPT, after being trained on the preceding chapters and a corpus of literature including medieval works. Illustrations for the book were made with Midjourney, a popular image-generation AI, by asking the AI to recreate artist-made images in “the style of a 1450s European illuminated manuscript”.
Bio
Alan Perry is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, installation, artist’s books, computer animation, 3D printing, creative coding, and photography. His work questions the relationship between past and present, with a particular focus on communication technology. Questions around how technology takes on a magical or arcane aura permeates his work. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Fort Collins, Denver, Portland, Seattle, and Chicago in the United States, and internationally in Gimpo, South Korea. He was granted a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photo Image Making from Colorado State University in 2013, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Art & Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019.