In 1969, Alvin Lucier recorded the sound of his voice, then played it back in the same room. Over and over, until all that remained was not his voice, but simply the drone of the most resonant frequencies in the room.
In 2021, we wondered what AI models would do if you fed them their own output, over and over, until there was nothing left of the initial prompt that kicked off the chain, and all that remained were the hallucinations of the AI.
Using then state-of-the-art generative AIs VQGAN+CLIP and GPT-3, collaborating pseudonymously as NA1 with illustrator and programmer Chuck Reina (under the name ZNO), we created a set of machine-hallucinated playing cards.
Each of the 50 decks of 60 cards was the result of a recursive process, feeding the previous cards in the deck back into the system until narratives, characters, histories, compulsive tics, and in-jokes emerged. The images were also made recursively, resulting in a flip-book appearance.
The theme of the collection was Entropy, thematically aligning the force of dissipation against life's tendency toward order.
In the world of the project, the cards were the result of a failed automation initiative at a major collectible card game company. In the eyes of the commissioning executives, the increasingly bizarre and unhinged output of their recursive AI system was unusable, so they scrapped the project and disconnected the machine that created it.
But an employee of the company became convinced that the AI was sentient, and in an effort to raise awareness of the machine's plight, she smuggled the cards to a local comic shop owner to sell at retail.
The website for the project featured a brilliant mini comic by ZNO and a classic 90s-style RPG interface for interacting with Ian, the comic shop proprietor, and for flipping through the cards in the store binder.
In addition to the high-resolution card images, we made poster-sized contact sheets and animated gifs for each deck.
To read more about the ideas and process behind the project, check out this this thoughtful writeup/interview with NA1 in nftnow.
Card Copy and Artwork: The Machine
Card Copy and Artwork Code, Masters Posters: Noah Norman / NA1
Data Management and Curation Tools, Card Background, Back, and Symbol Art, Ian, Entropy Website, Entropy Comic Book: Chuck Reina / ZNO
Acknowledgements:
Esser, Baumbach, and Ommer: VQGAN
OpenAI: CLIP and GPT-3
Katherine Crowson and Ryan Murdock: VQGAN+CLIP technique
