In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) systems have allowed artists, architects, and designers to explore machine hallucinations of images, text, sound, and 3D forms. These communities can pursue radical co-authorship with non-human agents to extend their creative practice, resist the industrial and commercial uses of such systems, or critique the bias that may exist in large datasets. Addressing each of these positions, this project investigates the ways that language is re-centered in the use of emerging Natural Language Processing and text-to image AI systems. Including a custom natural language processing (NLP) model trained on Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (Oxford, 1977), AI image sequences spawned from textual prompts, and algorithmically generated 3D forms, this transmedia installation critically explores the potentials and limitations of language in describing the intersections of physical and virtually imagined spaces.

Tivon Rice is an artist and educator working across visual culture and technology. Based in Seattle, his work critically explores representation and communication in the context of digital culture and asks: how do we see, inhabit, feel, and talk about these new forms of exchange? How do we approach creativity within the digital? What are the poetics, narratives, and visual languages inherent in new information technologies? And what are the social and environmental impacts of these systems? Rice holds a doctorate in digital art and experimental media from the University of Washington, where he is currently a professor of Data Driven Art. He was a Fulbright scholar (Korea, 2012) and one of the first individuals to collaborate with Google Artists + Machine Intelligence. His projects have traveled widely, with recent exhibitions at ARS Electronica, Linz, Austria; The National Gallery X, London; and The Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.