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Dreaming (of You)

2023-ongoing Plastic (ABS)
Dimensions variable (life-size)

But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization. Philip K. Dick

Site-specific installation of algorithmic proposed objects by generated for previous shows, drawn from an expanding algorithmic 3D project archive. Presented at CRCLR House, in the former think tank space of German government AI research. The objects are generated from an expanding algorithmic archive. With each new exhibition space, the environment expands through a new set of proposed objects. This was the third iteration of the project. The experience of watching your garden grow gives you some idea of how future AI systems will feel when observing human life. James Lovelock

Text by Caroline Ballegaard

Like abandoned props from a scenography or figures of a playset, parts rest huddled together, scattered across the floor and over one another. Among the ambiguous forms - oscillating between the amorphous and the familiar - appear what resembles a jug, a shelf, a table, a camera, a chair, a toilet brush, a brick, a bust, and an arrowhead. As if arrested in a state between solid and unstable, their lines have morphed and mutated: Soft yet rugged, the contours are at once organic and artificial, skeletal and abstract. Still, some evoke a sense of functionality, while others remain foreign, an elusive riddle. With its series of objects - approximating preserved debris or discarded relics - Dreaming (of You) stages an evolving tableau of cognitive estrangement. Constructed in ABS, a ubiquitous material found in toys, household appliances, and consumer electronics, the objects are rendered useless in pure plastic, cast as shadow-versions of themselves. The monochrome forms echo the fragments of archaeological artefacts transformed over time by hands and natural forces, yet their bluntness and sunken planes hint at a progressed process of erosion: features worn away to a point of obscurity, structures beginning to slump. Carrying sensory memories of utility and touch, the surfaces and shapes suggest an intimacy with the human body, but upon closer inspection, they come across as if in a dream state, alien in their distortion. Dreaming (of You) is an ongoing installation that changes with each iteration in response to its setting, continuously expanding in new locations. Starting from a collection of digitized physical spaces, the installation interacts with the "collective" knowledge embedded in the environments where it is exhibited and in the training sets of artificial neural networks. Every room has a story. Every dataset, too. Serendipitous connections take place in the processing of data, birthing artifacts, or "hallucinations." Using this purported nonsensicality, Dreaming (of You) plays with how spaces and their objects are coded, offering glimpses into the sea of data that neural networks navigate as well as ways of recoding in a continuous transference between the physical and the digital.