Daily Life of Human

2019 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

7:00 minutes

Siavash Naghshbandi

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Daily Life of Human is comprised of a fast-paced series of still images selected by the artist from ImageNet, a massive dataset of images (about 14 million) produced by BigGAN. Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs for short, are AI (machine learning) programs capable of generating (synthesizing, not finding) high-quality images. BigGAN is trained on how to make a certain type of image and then starts producing new images like those it learned from. Siavash Naghsbandi uses BigGAN’s output to present a rapid sequence of images that, if seen individually are uncanny, a strange and off-kilter, version of the world we inhabit. But when seen at high speed the viewer only catches glimpses of what looks like a world slightly askew, figures a bit grotesque. The sounds are recorded by Naghsbandi , from his daily life in Tehran, combined with sounds downloaded from the internet. Together with the computer-generated voice, and the script written by Naghsbandi, the result is an elegant combination of human and non-human production. One might even say a collaboration…between the artist and an AI. The subject and speaker is neither entirely human, nor AI but a blend of both.

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Siavash Naghshbandi has long been interested in computer systems and the approaching horizon of Artificial Intelligence. He’s curious about how these developments might transform society in the coming decades. Will the definition of the word ‘human’ change if humans are increasingly more integrated with computers, and computers get ever closer to passing the Turing test?

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Colors:

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• eldritch.s.01
• internet.n.01
• computer.n.01
• artificial_intelligence.n.01
• technology.n.01