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
00:44:17 · Sofia Puccini, Ruby Justice Thelot
[00:44:17] S1: Like, do [00:44:17] S0: you, like, do you find that it's in line with, like, the self empowering? Or, like, how do you [00:44:23] S1: I don't know. It's weird. I... It feels like we're in, like, a truly, like, chaotic soup of content right now [00:44:31] S0: Mhmm. [00:44:31] S1: That's, like, half... It's like some of it is mildly impressive. Like, very... I think few pieces of content elicit, like, a very strong emotional reaction in me. I think there's, like, been a few times this year, and I like to think a lot about Instagram edits. Like, if you if you ever, like... There's a show that you like and somebody makes a really impressive edit of it, I feel like that's, like, such a powerful, evocative, like, form of art and has been for a while. So... Yeah. So it's just like whenever I'm, like, scrolling and I'm looking through these, like, touch designer projects or, like, edited videos, there's stuff that's, like, pretty impressive, but it all kind of tends towards the same thing. [00:45:12] S0: Mhmm.
00:45:12 · Ruby Justice Thelot, Sofia Puccini
[00:45:12] S0: Mhmm. [00:45:13] S1: Like, it it feels like we all mode collapsed in a in a way. And it's nowhere near, like, some... For example, in, like like, growing up when I was watching music videos on YouTube, and there were truly people taking it in, like, striking directions that was just, like, so weird and and truly, like, came from their own minds. And I feel like that era of YouTube is, like, kind of dead. The best that we have now is, like, short form that's, like, kind of creative. I've been, like, trying to find the, like, beauty in short form for a while. Like, because I think there there are reels that have moved me. You know? They exist. I... But I was... [00:45:49] S0: Someone made a someone made, like, a a list... A canon list of, like, the best... They had, like, the Casey Frey dancing video with the the... They're just like these... To me, there's like... As as a cybernography, like, there's these moments on the Internet that are so... I watched that, and I was laughing, crying because those videos were still so Yeah. Funny and impactful. [00:46:10] S1: Yeah. Yeah. [00:46:10] S0: Yeah. Yeah. And I think... You know what? I teach in a creative technology program, into a design and media. Like, the students can kinda do whatever they want with technology. Yeah. And I think the main thing that I tell them is, like, why are you making this? Sometimes when I see the touch designer thing with the things, I'm like, I'm not exactly sure what this is for. Yeah. [00:46:30] S1: And what's the purpose?