VITRINE
EXHIBITION SERIES
APR 06, 2023
–
MAY 06, 2023
Colin Ives
Garden in the Machine / Vibrant Landscapes
Garden in the Machine / Vibrant Landscapes includes selected works by media artist Colin Ives. The exhibition features generative animations exploring technologically mediated notions of wilderness and the subjectivite underpinnings of human constructions of the “natural world”. Ives’ work employs AI models with algorithms trained on original footage of landscapes and still lifes to generate videos that question distinctions between pattern recognition and understanding.
“This project reveals how machine and garden have been almost inverted as computer modeling becomes the metric by which we understand and experience nature. We have entered a machine wilderness. I use AI models to create video works that address this contested territory.” — Colin Ives
Colin Ives is a Eugene, Oregon-based artist whose creative practice operates within a nexus of overlapping cultural categories, including art, technology, and ecology. He uses technology never as an end in itself, never an unexamined tool, but a chance to reflect, examine, and reveal aesthetic and cultural substructures. Across a diverse range of work, including media installation, kinetic video sculpture, sculptural objects, and interactive work, he explores how our digital tools are not only changing our capabilities, but also our worldview. His work has recently been included in the Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe, NM and in The Irruption at Santa Monica in Barcelona.
Artist’s Statement About the Work
We live in a time of constant predictive calculations. Powered by Artificial Intelligence, these analytics are deployed at every level of social structures, from advertising, policing and medicine to models of climate change. The sheer pervasiveness of these AIs underwrites the logic of their practice. The amplification of the value of functionality accounts for their ever-increasing deployment even in the face of known problems, such as the way in which they can retain or extend cultural bias. In this context, using AI in a non-functional way is an act of resistance. Leo Marx’s book The Machine in the Garden traces tensions between the ideal landscape and the Industrial Revolution. He contends that the pastoral is defined by the machine. “Wilderness” is that which is non-machinic. This project reveals how machine and garden have been almost inverted as computer modeling becomes the metric by which we understand and experience nature. We have entered a machine wilderness. I use AI models to create video works that address this contested territory. The video works are based on landscapes and still lifes. The work acknowledges how our expansive technologies have led to crises; yet its aim is restorative. The AI algorithm, trained on original footage of landscapes and still lifes, generates new sequences by predicting and adding new frames. The spatial trajectory of the source footage troubles the AI’s process of “understanding” patterns of relation. The resulting videos have an animate sense of desynchronization, an aesthetic strategy that reveals the copresence of multiple durations, temporalities, and tempos. In the landscape videos, representational drift evokes upheavals in geological time, an ever-changing reshaping: destruction, renewal: vibrancy. Traditional still life meditates on time; these works extend that sensibility into a contemporary expression of disjointedness. Petals, stems, pistols, stamen come together, fall apart. We’ve tried to contain the natural world, to dam its living rivers and stop its fluctuations, but here they’re set adrift in the unresolved contingencies of our times. Comfort and crises.
— Colin Ives