AI

Bio-Art 

Installation

The Corrupt Index imagines AI not as a creative tool but as an embodiment of a hegemonic knowledge system constructed upon the acts of collection, systematisation and categorisation. The ‘new-age’ text-to-image generators employ a million, accumulated references in order to distil a single, summary image – in this, each AI image is in itself an archive of the impulses resident within infinite prior prompts.


In the installation, a grid of such images, permeated as these are by the urge to impose a rigid structure upon a vast reservoir of deeply complex and fluid ecological intelligence is opposed by a fragile creature: slime mold. While the British Library, Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and North Pole Satellite Station – institutions of Western knowledge and power – are still recognisable on the screens, these slowly begin to distort. The Corrupt Index employs the three-day duration of the exhibition to induce a slow decomposition of these digital representations of rationalism.


Instead, we turn to the slime mould as a material embodiment of communal experience and memory – and paradoxically, their erasure. As an alive, sentient organism, slime mouuld learns and remembers with its whole body. However, as networks of mold grow, it releases gross mycotoxins, which are capable of causing memory loss among humans.


In the present exhibition thus, the mould grows and dies - simultaneously, digital images get corrupted and a slow oblivion of the canonised archive is engineered.