rotw(u)*
Fig. #01. Cover artwork for Digital Ecology Magazine, 2021.
AI and robots are not one and the same, although their iconography is connected by the urge of humans to provide anthropomorphic visualizations of artificial life forms that they hardly get to understand. ROTW(U) / in tilt is a short visual essay commissioned by Digital Ecology Magazine as a cover artwork for Giada Severini’s article: “Fine Art versus AlphaGo - China is the New Russia, AI is the new Moon: how China challenges US in a new Cold War-like race to AI supremacy”︎︎︎.
The article deals with a not-so-distant future in which the greatest world powers push artificial life forms’ slavery to its limits by employing AI as a mean of promoting their own conflicting political ideologies, be it neoliberal or neomarxist, with the deceit of freeing humans from work and from duties through technological advancement.
Why are we riding recklessly for AI supremacy When will we quit promoting other life forms’ exploitation? And who’s gonna pay for our ideological sins? The project depicts a dystopian future scenario where the body and conscience of artificial beings is dismembered by our selfish actions. Their synthetic protoplasm is broken, but their will lives strong in numbers. An algorithm predicts: «Robots of the world: Unite!».
Fig. #04. “ROTW — Doom / In Tilt”, Video Loop, 2021.