ARMOUR OF AN ARTIFICIAL IDENTITY

Armour of an Artificial Identity December 2024
generated portraits adhered to wood panel
13.5 x 13.5 in

Utilizing datasets of the my face, Armour of an Artificial Identity is a collection of 169 AI-generated headshots organized into an array intuitively organized by formal qualities & likeness to the my face. The title of the work is a reference to Lacan’s concept of the “Armour of an Alienating Identity,” detailed in Ecrits as the constructed ideal image of the self upon which a person will identify with, but since this image is inherently imperfect and alien, it creates a sort of dissonance. The work is heavily rooted in Lacanian ideas of the mirror stage & unobtainable desire. I’m interested in the psychological effects of viewing one’s own image, specifically the artifical replication of it. If the mirror stage marks the first moment of dissonance between the internal I and the external visage, then this uncanny replication of the self is a second layer of abstraction that furthers a deterritorialization of the self.

The Uncanny and the Automaton

Now, I cannot speak about corporeal images without making reference to Freud’s writing on the “uncanny,” as well as the concept of an automaton. The Uncanny Valley is a widely known concept most commonly associated with human-like forms in media: the depiction of an artificial person which is very close or accurate to reality, yet not quite there. The term was originally coined in 1970 by robotics professor Masahiro Mori, the ‘valley’ being this negative emotional response towards almost-human figures. The ‘uncanny’ part of the concept relates to Freud’s writing of the “unheimlich”, or “unhomely”. He makes reference to the story of an automaton in the Sandman, a figure that the characters cannot fully distinguish as alive or dead. The uncanny is the familiar made unfamiliar.

headshot photograph of lithe face
inputs: seed: 289602387317117, steps: 20, cfg: 8.0, sampler_name: euler, scheduler: normal, denoise: 1.0, checkpoint: sd_xl_base_1.0.safetensors, lora: gravegore_lithe_face.safetensors.

These generated portraits serve as a disembodied, uncanny likeness which stares back at the viewer. Think about studying your face in a mirror, noticing each mark, each imperfection. After long enough, you begin to question the likeness you see before yourself - What do you really look like? There is little continuity between repeated viewings, how you look one day may be different the next. No two photographs of myself are truly alike, and I suppose it is in this network of differences which I can construct an encompassing idea of my viscera. Yet back to the mirror experience, it is not too different from starting at a word as you read it, so much so that it begins to seem foreign. That can’t be spelled that way, can it? These moments serve as cracks in our established reality, pinholes in the firmament. A deterritorialization from our established order of reality, opening us up to the chaos beneath.

Chaos (D&G):

“We require just a little order to protect us from chaos.”

-Deleuze & Guattari, “From Chaos to Brain,” What is Philosophy? 1991

Chaos is a ‘play of forces’, which has no ‘presence,’ but maintains ‘infinite speed’.

• Chaos is what lurks in the background, as the latent space charged with infinite potentialities, with ‘infinite speed’¹.
• In the “From Chaos to Brain” text, they refer to order - opinions & ideas - as an umbrella from chaos (the real?), and it is the role of the artist/philosopher/scientist to ‘poke holes’ in this umbrella. Our reality is structured around patterns made out of our perceptions, and informed by our experience to create a belief structure which protects us from what truly is a disorganized chaotic reality. Divination often requires being free of mind, and to start from an unobstructed viewpoint as to prevent bias in the readings. But is divination, in its practice of finding images and messages in seemingly random results, not a part of that ‘patching holes in the umbrella’? (reintroducing opinion)

I am led to think about what happens when human perception is faced with true darkness, or to go further - death. The ultimate darkness/emptiness, a true matter of fact, upon which we must project ideas to shield us from its infinite, unchanging depth. Whitehead describes non-living entities as “dominated by averages,”² whereas living entities are defined by differences → back to Lacan, where the subject is defined by differences (what it is not decides what it is) & the object is defined by its materials.

baph, 2022, video still

Throughout my practice, I have been interested in ideas & practices of searching out patterns or signs in abstract or randomly generated images. The concept of pareidolia, when humans see faces or patterns where there are none, drove a lot of my work. I began relating it to divination, manifestation, and the practice of scrying - different techniques commonly used in occult or magic practices as a means of searching for answers, or predicting the future, commonly out of chaotic or random systems. Practices of scrying and divination often require a person to be in a state of uninhibited open-mindedness - free from opinion or order. In this way the medium opens themselves up to chaos, in order to draw out a message from the ‘great beyond’ so-to-speak (the beyond perhaps simply being the chaos we attempt to ignore via our structures of order).

• AI is like a biased and controlled scrying - it denoises an image based on a prompt and a dataset, and datasets are often biased. Bias goes against the basic rules of scrying/divination, to be uninhibited by thoughts or distractions. On top of this, utilizing a LoRA is further applying bias to the process.

• AI is a trivial system masquerading as a non-trivial one - you can define seeds to control results.

  • Computer noise isn’t truly random, compared to TV static. they are “deterministic machines”
  • Since computerized RNG is computed via algorithm, it is possible to reverse engineer it.

Lacan

“As soon as the subject himself comes to be, he owes it to a certain non-being on which he raises his being. And if he isn’t, if he isn’t something, he obviously bears witness to some kind of absence, but he will always remain purveyor of this absence.”

-Lacan Seminar II

The subject in the mirror represents a unity, one that cannot be constructed in reality from of our sensual perceptions. This is why deepfakes, filters, and AI replications of ourselves are so dangerous - they provide an endless supply of mirror images upon which to project our desires. We can imagine ourselves as anything in the world, and seamlessly place our images upon them. In this, we extrapolate the distance between Ideal and ourselves - we will never embody this mirror. And though it may look like us, it simultaneously never was us. One layer of separation comes from the mirroring of ourselves onto the screen, another comes from the abstraction of our corporeal materiality into digital data, and the final layer comes as we process ourselves into artificial replications. These images may resemble us, but they are replications - thrice removed from our corporeal forms.

“The unconscious is always manifested as that which vacillates in a split in the subject”

-Lacan, Seminar XI

I think there is also a sort of ‘seductive’ nature of this process of face generation; it’s odd and off-putting, yet simultaneously activates some neurons and makes me more and more curious about the AI’s nature and process of producing replications of my face. I didn’t even set out to make hundreds of generations of my face, my original plan was to train a LoRA on my artwork to experiment with vague prompts to tease out the behavior of AI training on abstract images. I supplied it with facial data as an add-on, and used its replication of my likeness as a baseline for its accuracy. It’s tapping into some subconscious desires I suppose, manufacturing a separated form upon which to project. It’s also a tool to reify my sense of the real, I understand that this is artificial, this is not me, so I can affirm that the vessel I occupy is me.

Yet the real is a latent space, constructed by the imaginary and the symbolic. Subjectivity comes from identification, with symbols, ideas, subjects, or beliefs, and simultaneously is defined by what it is not. Objects are made up of materials (images made up of data), and subjects are made up of differentiation and identification.

We are in a constant state of becoming. A bit of a tangent:

Where beginnings are concerned, we should see that we are sitting here, and every moment is always, always a beginning.

-Heinz Von Foerster, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Have No Name (2)

Everything is here and now, each moment a genesis, and we cannot move backwards. History exists only through its witnesses - “it is as you tell it” - and this historical context is what establishes our common sense of time as linear. You must believe in historical narrative in order to establish your position on the line. Thinking along this path, I am reminded of Last Thursdayism, in reference to the creation of the Garden of Eden and Adam & Eve - the idea that the Earth could have been created as soon as last Thursday, with each part manufactured as it appears today. History is ‘proven’ by its witnesses - yet these witnesses only can speak of what was, they cannot reproduce these events exactly as they were.

It is in this line of thought that we can think of reality as entangled in perspective (experience→perception). Our reality is made up of the things around us we interact with.

“If we look somewhere, we can of course “create” patterns— and therefore we have also ‘seen’ them.” (13)

“Cognition → computing a reality”

-Heinz Von Foerster, Understanding Understanding

Unheimlich: The Spiral of Chaos and the Cognitive Automaton

“Chaos and the automaton are the opposite and mutually reinforcing poles of the current sinisterness of the world.”

-Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Unheimlich: The Spiral of Chaos and the Cognitive Automaton, 2023

Back to visages. Looking at the generations of my face, I kind of see it as an experiment with this idea of automatons created to control chaos - an eerie replication as a distraction from the chaos of the world. the umbrella has been torn apart, and I am scrounging for scraps to cover me from the rain. Bifo asks what the effects of dealing with ‘cognitive automatons’ are on social unconscious. We can’t exactly retreat back into “reality,” as it is difficult to point to one unified & pure reality untinged by networks of machines.

“The horizon of the third decade is darker than ever, as we come to realize that Reason is no longer the ruler, if it ever was. Technology has taken its place, but we do not feel reassured, for technology can do nothing against time, and little against chaos.”

Let’s all just panic!

• Technology is replacing reason → the corporeal face as a signifier of one’s being, replaced by the generated image of that face which is a flattened, identified, and data-fied version (averaged out and non-living). The generated face as a more-than-self. It is impossible to reason with data, it is a language we don’t really understand³.

  “Technology has created intelligent machines that are incomprehensible to the rational mind of their human creators”

• “Chaos is exploding everywhere as an effect of the crisis of reason”

  • “Ernesto De Martino defines the expression “end of the world” as the inability to interpret the signs that surround us. When societies are no longer able to interpret the world they are experiencing, we can speak of the end of the(ir) world”
    • Days go by and generative content is increasingly difficult to decipher. What if I was digitally replaced? When we are wholly surrounded my machines, machines making content for machines and interfacing with machines, what will happen to us? Will we completely lose touch with our once recognizable world?
  • “Time and mathematics do not coincide, because in time there is joy, decay, and death, phenomena that mathematics cannot understand because they belong to the realm of experience. “Experiri,” in the sense of living in the horizon of death, in the sense of becoming nothing—this is not translatable into recombinatory language.”
    • well the faces are uncanny, yet perhaps it is comforting to be absorbed in the corporeal chaos of the real world. but DAMN where IS the REAL?

Maybe all of this thinking is tooo much trying to think like a machine?

“Cybernetics in this sense is about adjusting the fit between the self-conscious human system and its machinic/informational surround. For those who have staked their lives on the preservation of a core of raw human freedom, the feedback loop is an endless journey into the void environment of infinitely interconnected machines.”

-Brian Holmes, Count to Three

Chaos & Speed

We are not going any faster, we are aIl hurtling onward for fear of falIing.

-Glissant, “The Black Beach,” Poetics of Relation, 1990

Those who dominate benefit from the chaos; those who are oppressed are exasperated by it.

-Glissant, “Distancing, Determining,” Poetics of Relation, 1990

This speeding up of relationships has repercussions on how the full-sense of identity is understood. The latter is no longer linked, except in an occasionally anachronistic or more often lethal manner, to the sacred mystery of the root. It depends on how a society participates in global relation, registers its speed, and controls its conveyance or doesn’t. Identity is no longer just permanence; it is a capacity for variation, yes, a variable-either under control or wildly fluctuating

-Glissant, “Distancing, Determining,” Poetics of Relation, 1990

While I could make a weird/uncanny image of my face via photoshop or analog materials, I feel it is this immediate generation of an uncanny image of myself via AI that is jarring. Why do jump scares startle us? Because they are sudden & unexpected. We live comfortably through a slow drift.

Nothing is more interesting to watch than the emotional disturbance produced by any unusual disturbance of the forms of process. The slow drift is accepted. But when for human experience quick changes arrive, human nature passes into hysteria. For example, gales, thunderstorms, earthquakes, revolutions in social habits, violent illnesses, destructive fires, battles, are all occasions of special excitement. There are perfectly good reasons for this energetic reaction to quick change. My point is the exhibition of our emotional reactions to the dominance of lawful order, and to the breakdown of such order. When fundamental change arrives, sometimes heaven dawns, sometimes hell yawns open.

- Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (93)

Understanding Media

Through this transformation the classical triangulation – the expressive chain (chaînon expressif), the object of reference (l’objet référé) and the meaning (signification) – will be reshaped. For instance, the electronic photo is no longer the expression of a univocal referent but the production of a reality among others.

-Felix Guattari, Towards a Postmedia Era, 1990

Media is changing the way we think: the way we perceive the world, the way we understand ourselves, the way we establish truths, and is even modulating our behavior. Since I have been thinking about how technology & immediacy effects our psychology, I can’t help but return to Guattari’s Towards a Postmedia Era text, written at a time when the internet was in its beginnings, and he was using the French Minitel system quite frequently. He spoke about how new forms and techniques of using media were beginning to modulate our understandings of reality and perception, and thus our subjectivity.

Media isn’t something external to us that we passively receive and actively interpret but is a fundamentally constitutive part of us. In a very literal sense, we are media.

-Trevor Paglen, Society of the Psyop, Part 3: Cognition and Chaos, 2024, e-flux.

Just like how Whitehead stated that “we cannot define where a body begins and where external nature ends --- The body is part of the external world”⁴ Our corporeality is entangled in the world, we sort of exist as an extension of it - and since media is part of this world, we are then enveloped in that as well.

Far from being a return to earth, the events in Iraq made us lift off into an almost delirious universe of mass-media subjectivity. New technologies foster efficiency and madness in the same flow.

-Felix Guattari, Towards a Postmedia Era, 1990

I think about this quote quite a lot, mostly the lifting off into a “delirious universe of mass-media subjectivity” part. As technological advancement accelerates, so does our pace towards ‘madness’ (& chaos?). Guattari did not witness the advent of generative AI or Large Language Models (LLM), yet he seemed to understand that media technologies both created efficiency and also furthered the gap between our understandings of ourselves and machines.

MAGIC!

(perhaps somewhat unrelated, yet valuable nonetheless)

It should be widely understood and universally agreed upon that distinctions within the arts are no longer necessary. In the wake (in the funereal sense) of postmodernism, the necessity, desire, or rationale for divisions within the arts has been allowed to putrefy for far too long. Bury it or burn it, but yearn for it no longer. The complete realization of a creative liberation of the “true will to live” demands immediate convolution of all discourses - not simply painting, sculpture, and performance, but biology, history, agriculture, politics and so on. Is this simply interdisciplinarianism? No! It is the elaborate and pragmatic integration of all things related into an associative life/practice that summons the creative and prophetic power of the multitude. In short, it is creative problem-solving and the refusal to dine on the ashes that fuel the commodification of our efforts to explore the wonders of a momentary existence.

-Center for Tactical Magic, “Raiders of the Lost Arts,” Tactical Magic Manifesto

Chaos Magick - perception is structured around beliefs, and belief can be used as a tool (wikipedia)

• chaos magic rejects absolute truth? → whitehead/foerster
• That last sentence “irrational thinking can often be the faster route to a rational solution,” will schizoanalysis and molecular alternative practices enable us to thrive off instability? (WIP)

Conclusion/Postscript

There’s a lot going on under the hood we do not understand about machines, data, and AI. This exponential development of efficiency happens so quickly in hidden away labs we don’t see until they procure a public document for our reading. We’re moving so fast towards a hazy horizon. Reading the news sometimes feels like opening up to the chaos of society. Anxiety creates itself out of the dissonance between chaos’s unpredictability and our human desire for order.

Created by Lithe Ettawageshik for Chaosmotic Systems Fall 2024

References:

Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, Distancing, Determining, Heinz von Foerster, Corporeality, Expression

Tags:

uncannywhiteheadfoersterglissantDGdeleuzeguattarilacanfreudbifochaosmagicpaglenholmesFA24

Footnotes

1. Young, Genosko, Watson, “Chaos”The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary, 2013, page 59 ↩

2. Alfred North Whitehead, “Expression” Modes of Thought, 1939, page 27 ↩

3. Trevor Paglen, Invisible Images: Your Pictures Are Looking at You, 2016, The New Inquiry ↩

4. Alfred North Whitehead, “Expression” Modes of Thought, 1939, page 21 https://www.metamute.org/editorial/lab/towards-post-media-era ↩