The Corrupt Index
Anuj Malhotra (IN); Başak Tüsüz (TR); Kseniia Rybak (UA); Luca Cacini (IT); Ruiyu Yi (CN)
Kunsthal NORD
AI
Bio-Art
Installation
Bio-Art
Installation
The Corrupt Index imagines AI not as a creative tool but as an embodiment of a hegemonic system of knowledge constructed upon the acts of collection, systemisation and categorisation. The ‘new-age’ text-to-image generators employ a million, accumulated references in order to distill 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 a rationalism.
Instead, we turn to the slime mold as a material embodiment of communal experience and memory – and paradoxically, their erasure. As an alive, sentient organism, slime mold 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 mold grows and dies - simultaneously, digital images get corrupted and a slow oblivion of the canonised archive is engineered.
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 a rationalism.
Instead, we turn to the slime mold as a material embodiment of communal experience and memory – and paradoxically, their erasure. As an alive, sentient organism, slime mold 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 mold grows and dies - simultaneously, digital images get corrupted and a slow oblivion of the canonised archive is engineered.
