I was awarded the 2022-2023 BRIClab Video Art fellowship at the BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn. During my fellowship, I am fine-tuning a text-generating machine learning model on 15 dystopian texts that are set in New York to generate text that is the basis of a short film. The film combines original, found and generative footage and tells a story of immigrant belonging, contaminated future, and New York City.
The following text opens the film:
From air to earth: I come away from home and toward the unknown beyond. Others think my journey is a simple search for a better life, yet I’m crossing a threshold. For now, I am lost. The maps I brought with me so precisely accurate, turn out to be useless. New York is a place of limbo where we are categorized by language and rootedness. I am watermeal, a rootless plant hoping to carry a seed. Nothing is solid. My head is floating in the sea. A sea of pixels like flocks of mechanical owls transmitting news from heaven. I look up and see a hundred thousand satellites transmitting messages; they glow like dots on my screen. Every threshold is a process of crossing and looking back. I’m in the Big Apple, still dreaming of home.
Generative software used in this project:
Fine-tuned Curie
Stable Diffusion
Midjourney
Dalle
TouchDesigner