00:36:39 · Sofia Puccini, Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:36:39] S1: Like, they're like, oh, you know, we're hopping on the, like, the next boat or the next trend or whatever. [00:36:43] S0: I think there are... At any point in time, right, in the sixties, there were artists who were doing abstract expressionism, and they wanted to stay doing that and stay in the studio making paintings. Some artists were working with printing techniques. So I'm talking about talking about the work of, say, like, an Andy Warhol or whatnot. Yeah. But then there are some artists who saw the rise of these new technologies and are like, that's what I wanna work with. Yeah. And I think it's just... We just accept that sometimes the role of the artist is to see what is at the margin of society, technology, or culture. Like, that's what they do. Yeah. And so I'm often reminded in the space of music of, well, people really disliked auto tune. Right? [00:37:23] S1: Yes. Sampling.
00:37:23 · Sofia Puccini, Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:37:23] S1: Yes. Sampling. [00:37:24] S0: Yes. Sampling, auto tune. And so, you know, like, zero eight and heart and heartbreak, the Kanye record, like, that using the the t Pain's auto auto tune method and his workflows, bring that into the pop pop culture. I mean, it ended up, like, working. It just... It... You just need the experimentation. Yeah. Or, like, if you... Like, when Dylan went electric, I'm sure people were, like, very mad at that. But it is just a part of artistic progress that sometimes you re... You recognize that a tool has immense capabilities that are underexplored. Right? A big thing with what T Pain did with Auto Tune is that it wasn't to voice correct. It became in of itself an instrument. Yes. And so Auto Tune was not about the output, but it was about now having another tool to modulate one's voice. And I think what I like the most about creative technology, like, if I had, like, a vision for it, it would be that AI enabled technology isn't in service of making an output. It's not to make an image. It's not to make a video. It's to build new tools with which we can now make new things in the future. Yes. And that's something that I'm very interested in. Like, I'm very, like Yeah. Bullish and excited by that vision. [00:38:42] S1: Yeah. Do you, I mean, do you practice any kind of art? I know, like, you know, show... Doing a show is an art form in a way. But do you have any other, like, practice that you engage with a lot that you've, like, tried to use AI in or, like, use some sort of tool?
00:38:55 · Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:38:55] S0: I mean, yeah. I mean, people who are familiar with my work... Of course, I'm I'm I'm a new media artist. I've been making work for... I was just talking to to someone on the phone. 2017, I had my first gallery show. So Yes. We're coming on ten years now of of of... And I had my first museum show this year. Yeah. And, you know, in '20... I wanna say 2022 or '3 or '4, I made a film called A Single Spartan Girl that was made with AI. We toured it, went to a bunch of festivals, won a prize at the film festival in Marseille. Mhmm. This is an experimental film festival, but, like, I Yeah. I was really curious. Like, my whole process with this, and it ended up becoming this talk called What is Truth, was, okay. Well, I've noticed that this is the place where we're gonna get information now. And there's there's certain pieces of information that are kind of conflicting that are, like, contentious. And so if I'm wondering, for instance, what was the cause of the Trojan War? What is is gonna tell me? What is the different LLM gonna tell me? And how does that mimic, of course, the process through which we made history, in, say, the antiquity? So I'm I'm using here the example of of the Trojan War of the Iliad, where there's a couple of different accounts. And when we're trying to do a historiography or, like, we're trying to figure out what happened, we use parts of the somewhat fantastical accounts with the gods and whatnot. We use the archaeological records, and we build our Western historical canon piecemeal through a lot of these different voices. And what I thought was very interesting with doing this with AI is, like, AI is, like, literally polyglossal. Like, it's taking all the different voices, bring them together. And so in the film, the script or the poem that's kind of the epic that's behind it is in part Homer, in part an LLM, in part Sappho, who, of course, was, one of the diverse female poet, and my own interpretation of what had happened during that time because I wanted to recreate enmeshment and a layering of different potential stories altogether. Because I think that's what... Imagine, like, you're you're a villager and, like, there's a different bard coming every year to tell the the the story of the Trojan war. They're gonna, like, change it up
00:41:14 · Sofia Puccini, Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:41:14] S1: a little Yeah. Yeah. [00:41:16] S0: So that was, like, that movie, and then there's another short film that I made called Why Aliens Love America, which also uses AI, and we showed that earlier this year at the White Hotel. [00:41:26] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:41:29] S0: Yeah, I think that's... Especially, like, once again, like, I'm I'm writing about aliens. I'm making a movie about aliens. It makes sense that I want to think about this alien superintelligence. [00:41:37] S1: Yes. Yeah. Totally. I completely... I mean, I totally see that as, like, a use case. I just feel... I feel like if you remember when Dolly first came out, and it was such a cool experimental thing. And I remember I was, like, writing... Like, I did a lot of short story writing in the past. And then I was, like, starting to do stuff with music. Mhmm. And I was, like, a lot of the things I naturally want, the stories I wanna tell are about future scenarios. Or... And they involve AI as a character. And so I I just remember that era when AI was still very nascent and weird, and it was like an indie thing. Mhmm. And so I used it a lot and, like, talked about it a lot and referenced it. And then now it's become, like, such a meta character in, like, everything that we do. And it just kinda feels like it was never supposed to be the main character. [00:42:25] S0: Mhmm.
00:42:25 · Ruby Justice Thelot, Sofia Puccini
[00:42:25] S0: Mhmm. [00:42:25] S1: Like, it was all... It it was supposed to be something that we could still, I don't know, like like reference and dream about in our own way. And now it's... Everyone thinks of the same thing. Like, think of, like, the same two companies when they think about AI. And they don't think about this, like, amorphous blob that used to be a main, like, theme in science fiction. You know?
00:42:45 · Ruby Justice Thelot, Sofia Puccini
[00:42:45] S0: Yeah. I mean, I am, my dear friend Alexia Adana, who is now at Luma, Luma AI, was the video artist in residence at OpenAI when they had that program with Sora. And what she was doing was really, really cool because what she noticed is the thing Minne Atairu noticed and that a lot of thinkers like myself were, like, at the intersection of, like, blackness and AI. Realized that, oh, there's some things that are not in the dataset. Yeah. And so for for Alexia, for Minae, for people like this, it became a possibility to build these sort of alternative datasets that had... That represented, I think, their respective communities. And specifically for Alexia, who's almost like a futurist in how she approaches her art... Like, she has a... If you go on her Instagram page, we'll make sure to link to it. It's, like, really crazy stuff she's able to make with these different models and whatnot. But they are centered on a black woman and, like, how she can exist in the future. I mean, I also thought that was very beautiful and very interesting. Like, once again, it's the same thing that I talked about yesterday with techno and and and the techno rebel techno rebel by way of Toffler, how technology as a means to empower oneself. Yeah. And I think that that's what's very interesting to me in that work. Do you find that the stuff you see online, whether it be the media pipe stuff, whatever. Like, do do do The Yeah. Yeah. The touch designer stuff. [00:44:17] S1: Like, do