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.