After the Truth : in the Latent Spaces of Artificial Imagination – Kikk – Namur, BE

25/10/2024
https://www.kikk.be/fr/talk/gregory-chatonsky

Our times seem to be marked by the multiplication of truth regimes and the virtual disappearance of common sense and the most elementary rationality. Minds seem to be engaged in an interminable battle, with each side elaborating its discourse in relation to what it anticipates from the other, in a game of feedback.

Faced with the difficulty of understanding this collapse of a truth (which probably never existed), could it be that the widespread use of AI in media production could provide some clues? Could the automation of resemblance through statistical induction, making it possible to generate media of media, resembling but each time different, be the medium of a new age of truth? Would the latent space of AIs take the place of the photorealism of indexical media that determined twentieth-century realism? Are we witnessing the emergence of a new realism, based on a new memory, of which regimes of truth are only one effect?

These questions will be addressed, drawing on some of my work which, since 2009, has explored AI as a medium in its own right.