New Interfaces 03/ Zuzana Husárová: Bridging fictive automata and synthetic works in neural network culture

MEDIUM Gallery, Hviezdoslavovo námestie 18, Bratislava

"My blood boils and goes to scratch me when I hear all that machine music" (from E.T.A. Hoffmann's short story Automata, 1814). "EMI scared me. I was terrified. I hated it and felt extremely threatened by it” (American computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter on hearing synthetic music in the mid-1990s). From German romanticism to contemporary synthetic works in which the vernacularization potential of the culture of neural networks is manifested - the lecture addresses narrative and scientific myths associated with humanoid machinery and "artificial intelligence". The father of the family's view of the unspecified automatic Odradek from Kafka's short story The Care of the Head of the Family, who lives as a mechanical being and a former part of a more complex form ("He probably doesn't harm anyone; but the thought that he might even outlive me is almost painful for me"), in to a certain extent, it underpins Günter Anders' concept of "Promethean shame". This Anders' concept, based on a techno-romantic position, is in sharp contrast to artistic ideas that place non-human beings in an inferior position to humanity, but it turns the scales in the opposite direction - it depicts humanity as unable to cope with the machine, a thesis that has frightened representatives of several professions since the start of ChatGPT.

"There are machines in the world that think, learn, and create," Simon and Newell published in 1958 in a paper predicting a major shift in computing technology during the 1970s. they entered a three-dimensional chess game thinking they were checkers." In the current wave of AI Spring, we also witness various mythologizing manifestations of "artificial intelligence" competencies, which however largely manifest as a set of language games (rather than accomplished goals) that they define the culture of neural networks.We will show their examples in selected synthetic works of art.

Zuzana Husárová is an author and theoretician of electronic literature and digital media, she also creates experimental and sound poetry and poetic performances. She published poetry books liminal, lucent, amoeba, Hyper, co-edited theoretical publications.

New Interfaces 03 is a series of five lectures led by the experts from various fields of contemporary art discourse or specialists on themes that resonate with artists working in the post-media environment. The series, under the dramaturgy of Miroslava Urbanova, gallery manager of the Medium Gallery, focuses primarily on themes touching on our conditions of cognition in the interfaces of constantly updating technologies and in contrast to the desire for an authentic, visceral experience of the elusive here and now. These themes appear in art with increasing urgency, both in the overflow of performative works or works thematizing these new interfaces.

Supported by public funds from the Slovak Arts Council.