07. NEXT LA
What happens when a city becomes a desert, ghost ecosystems come back to haunt a damaged planet, and an AI developer builds an alternative version of Los Angeles? Using custom stable diffusion models trained on historical and future images of Los Angeles, as well as the deserts, highways, and the gigantic water infrastructure projects framing the broader landscape of Southern California, Next LA is a hallucinatory glimpse into a speculative urban environment that’s yet to arrive. Oscillating between organic and artificial, abstract and hyper-real, near-future apocalypse and post-human sublime, these videos lay the conceptual groundwork for The Alluvials, a new video project and playable game environment by the artist Alice Bucknell.
06. His And Hers Computers
His And Hers Computers is a recurring asset in my work. This union of two local machines by a mass of cables between them symbolizes the digital bond between myself and my late husband, Tvordis.
This artifact is spun off from A Time Capsule Or A Grave: a hybrid performance project initially commissioned by the Tezos Foundation for Octobre Numérique Faire Monde in Arles, France in October 2022. It connects a series of IRL performances with a persistent virtual environment on New Art City, each of which evolve between every iteration. Audio recordings of each performance are broken into clips and installed in the virtual environment at each place where they were spoken, forming an ever expanding dialogue between versions of myself across time.
- Sammie Veeler
05. Suspended Pathways: Los Angeles
Suspended Pathways: Los Angeles is an algorithmic extension of Lisa Orth’s Suspended Pathways series. This special edition is released in conjunction with NFTuesdayLA's new logo designed by Orth and celebrates our digital art community.
04.Cold and silent, like a heart
"Cold and silent, like a heart" is a feminist reinterpretation of Antonín Dvořák's symphonic poem: "The Water Goblin" (1896), based on a poem of the same name by Czech folklorist Karel Jaromír Erben from 1853. The poem is about a goblin who abducts a young maiden and forces her to bare his child. It ends with the girl reconnecting with her mother and refusing to return to her unhappy life with the goblin, which the goblin then punishes by murdering their child. In Marple's reimagining, told through animated images and select stanzas from Erben's poem, the goblin is removed from the narrative. The focus becomes the girl's mental state and what now reads as her decision to end the life of her own child—a la a kind of abortion. The story is still a heavy one, but it at least depicts the young girl with her unwanted pregnancy as a person of agency rather than an agent-less victim.
- Mieke Marple
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03.MEMORY OF FIRE
MEMORY OF FIRE is a glimpse into the conversation between AI and Connie Bakshi that created ANATOMY OF FIRE. Each image emerges from a recursive discourse of words and visuals around FIRE IN SILVERLAKE, a poem by AI poet VERSA. The final image is an interpretation of the last line of the poem (‘…and a long kiss I’ve never tasted.’) that embodies the memory of both the full text and every previous visual iteration of the discourse.
02.ANATOMY OF FIRE
The ANATOMY OF FIRE, the culmination of a visual conversation between AI and Connie Bakshi, is both an Exquisite Corpse and an homage to the Fluxus movement and its dialogue around indeterminacy. The artwork emerges out of a sequential and recursive line-by-line interpretation of FIRE IN SILVERLAKE, a poem by AI poet VERSA. The final image is an interpretation of the last line of the poem that embodies the memory of both the full text and every previous iteration of the visual discourse. Minted on October 18, 2022.
01.FIRE IN SILVERLAKE
VERSA is an emergent AI poet developed by theVERSEverse x Ross Goodwin, trained on the collective and ever-expanding poetry of the writers of theVERSEverse. This poem by VERSA was generated from ten LA-inspired prompts sourced by the NFTuesdayLA community and minted on August 23, 2022.
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