Screening :
Session One : 26 July 2024 Friday 6:30pm
Session Two : 27 July Saturday 4pm
Session Three : 27 July Saturday 6pm
Session Four : 28 July Sunday 4pm
Session Five : 28 July Sunday 6pm
Free Entry | 6 places each session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for a place
Running Time : 1 hour
Nick Land’s Meltdown AI-fication (2024) by Kosmas Giannoutakis (US) was selected from the DIVFUSE / INNOVATE 2024 Open Call.
This project vivifies by means of AI-generated audiovisual media the seminal essay ‘Meltdown'(1995) written by the “father of accelerationism,” controversial philosopher Nick Land. This early accelerationist essay speculates a technocapital singularity that leads to an AI apocalypse that renders humanity obsolete. All sentences of the text are used as prompts for text-to-image, text-to-video, and text-to-music/sound ML models. Nick Land’s voice is cloned and deep-faked from one of his online interviews to generate an artificial narration of his own text. The assembled hour-long schizofilm has a satirical/Dionysian attitude and chimerizes elements of music video, video essay, sci-fi, and documentary.
The conceptual ramifications of this artistic project are various and ambiguous. It aims to clarify to the proponents of Effective accelerationism that accelerationism is a critical, nihilist, and anti-humanist worldview in contrast to the utopian, techno-solutionist, and Promethean ethos that is driving the current AI renaissance.
This experiment delves into the interplay between Nick Land’s theory-fiction and contemporary Large language models, aiming to unravel the nuances of their inherent biases alongside their potential for progressive conceptualizations. Framed as a hyperstitional artifact, this project is conceived as if commissioned by a future AI imbued with Landian philosophy, with the intention of its eventual assimilation prompted by the possibility of the film’s internet virality.
The resulting film serves as a translation of the Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalytic rhizomatic method employed in the original essay into a cinematic language. It boldly reimagines notions of subjectivity, desire, and the (dis)organization of society. Additionally, it ventures into Nick Land’s machinic practicism, an experimental philosophical approach that advocates for a departure from representation and abstraction in favor of a materialist immersion.
Kosmas Giannoutakis is a composer, media artist, computer musician, and researcher based in upstate New York. He engages in artistic and scholarly endeavors that explore contemporary advancements in technology, such as Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Ledger Technology, as well as theoretical concepts including critical posthumanities and speculative materialisms.
Image by Kosmas Giannoutakis
