VITRINE
EXHIBITION SERIES
JUL 12 – AUG 12, 2024
Tyler Calkin
Green Dissonance
Green Dissonance features AI-driven artworks created with machine learning networks by interdisciplinary artist Tyler Calkin. The exhibition includes animations and simulations presenting artificial worlds through the “symbiotic interrelation” of real-world sources. Green Dissonance examines conditions of cognitive dissonance and ecological precarity amidst climate crisis.
“… Responding to current developments in consumer hardware and software, and most recently to pandemic tech practices, I construct interactive and immersive propositions for interpersonal experience. I use emerging technologies both to critique corporate philosophy and to create meaningful experiences for the public …” — Tyler Calkin
Tyler Calkin is an interdisciplinary artist who has exhibited his work across the United States an internationally. Recent projects have been screened and exhibited at the Supernova Digital Animation Festival, Leonardo/ISAST, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Tiger Strikes Asteroid LA, Sierra Arts Foundation, The Reef, Stay Gallery, Tsinghua University, University of Southern California, Torrance Art Museum, and Centre for the Living Arts.
Green Dissonance, 2022, web game, live simulation of terrains generated through machine learning process with randomized camera pans
Artist’s Statement About the Work
Green Dissonance is a multimedia project in which a machine learning network tries to understand the climate crisis. The network, a StyleGAN (Generative Adversarial Network), performs the cognitive dissonance created as we watch the planet collapse while engaging in individual green acts, such as recycling. This network, designed to work with very large and self-similar datasets, instead is fed two relatively small, visually dissimilar sets of images. One set is a collection of photographs of environmental disasters such as floods, droughts, and oil rig fires. The second set is a series of 3D renderings that visualize motion capture data.
These motion capture renderings were created using a mocap suit and 3D modeling software germane to video game content creation pipelines. These tools are suited to producing fantasy worlds but here they are used to understand the ecological precarity of our physical world: the motion capture recordings document a human body separating recyclable and non-recyclable household trash. The motion pathways are then extruded as dimensional geometry, and rendered as still images.
The result of this futile machine learning synthesis is an abstract animation with unsettling amorphous qualities. In a representational turn, still frames from this animation are transformed into virtual terrains that resemble natural topographies, as if the planet's surface has been re-formed through the interaction of an artificial mind’s reconciliation with ineffectual attempts to save it. The terrains exist in a simulated 3D world running on a video game engine, complete with blue sky and sun. A randomized array of cameras captures various vistas through sunrise and sunset. Despite the evident passage of days and nights there is stasis in this artificial world; a new, perfectly stable balance is struck through the symbiotic interrelation of its real-world sources.