THE HUB Original

THE HUB
Multimedia installation
37min loop
AI generated text, electronic music, 3D animated video, objects, lights

THE HUB is an audio-visual installation entangled within contemporary spirituality and digital technology. The audience follows the narration of a dream journey that was written in collaboration with the AI-supported text-generating engine GPT-3. The project started with experiments by feeding GPT-3 with typical dream journeys and personal imaginations, to then feedback the generated texts as new material. The further this process went, the more uncanny and narcissistic the texts became. What started as a stereotypical meditation guide to finding oneself, gradually turned into ideas about corporeal self-dissolution in the universe – as imagined by the AI.

This text was then recorded in an advertising or ASMR-like manner by a female narrator which results in a confusion about the human or non-human nature of the dream journey. By following its suggestive imagination, the artificial intelligence subversively manipulates the listener’s inner-spiritual field. While a plethora of issues are nowadays entrusted to technological ‘solutions’, the trouble-shooting of the soul remains usually reserved for other humans who are deemed more deft in matters of the subconscious.

Supporting, distorting, and at times contradicting the narrative, the electronic music adds the second foundational pillar to the dream journey. It was composed around experimental appropriations of elements derived from mystic, esoteric, sci-fi and psychedelic origins with references reaching from Scriabin to New Age to La Monte Young to ‘Alpha Waves for Studying’. However, in contrast to the typical static flux of meditation music, the music within BREATHE juxtaposes often drastically the changing sonic worlds and expressions.

Furthermore, while going through these vast musical transformations, a video immerses the viewer in an eternal flight through 3D-animated objects and shapes extracted from related contexts – a lotus flower, fractals, Buddha statues, outer space etc. Projected onto three walls in the room, the video functions as a spatial extension in both the literal and metaphorical sense. The audience can emplace themselves on day beds in the middle of the room to experience the entirety of the 37-minute loop without physical strain.

Around them, three self-built grow boxes are placed in which plants related to the field of astrobotany are arranged. They function as symbols for the installation’s emotional influencing of the audience. Just like these plants absorb meticulously plentiful light, water and nutrition, our audience and the average consumer of such esoteric content are exposed to inputs that are meant to control the transformation of their being – habitually in the form of self-enhancement: growth. Wi-Fi-controllable RGB lights add an auxiliary atmospheric development and are synchronised with speech, music and video.

THE HUB unfolds divergent layers of today’s technology-infested perspectives on the human-self and its relationship to its artificial other. It comes to realisation by probing indicators in culture and obscuring the boundaries between artistic and artificial agency.