Memories From the Latent Space
10th December 2022 - #AI #rituals #algorithms #generativeAI #latentspace - Anna Fasolato & Alessandro Y. Longo -
In the fall of 2022, Alessandro was part of the P2P Residency led by Taeyoon Choi and hosted by C/O Berlin. At the end of the program, on the occasion of the C/O Digital Festival, participants were invited to share a work with the public visiting the museum. After weeks of speculation, Alessandro and Anna Fasolato decided to use this chance to play a game with fellow residents and participants: Memories From the Latent Space.
The game is a way to explore the Latent Space of Text-to-Image models, where words and images get connected in unpredictable ways, just remotely similar to human reasoning. In a time when these technologies have become unavodiable, we try to cast a playful dimension to learn and imagine a re-enchantment of these tools. These artifacts catalyze several questions about the future of our digitalized present that we try to tackle collectively.
What is exactly the game about?
Memories from the Latent Space is a guessing game that uses AI technologies to stimulate playful and insightful considerations around the future of our digital society. The game lets players explore the weird connection between words and images in our computational era. They had to collaborate to craft a prompt drawing inspiration from a set of quotes that we distributed. The quotes come from our favorite thinkers, and they compose a theoretical patchwork that tackles the issues of our digital society. Later, we tried to connect together the quotes with the image and the prompt.
The rules are simple:
✦ Eeach player selects a quote, from a pre-composed collection, and then types an inspired prompt - a textual input - into the model interface.
✦ When every player has created the image, the real game will start: each participant will try to guess to which quote the image is inspired, discussing the reasons and maybe speculating on the quote itself. If nobody guessed, the creator of the image can intervene with a personal explanation about their personal view on the connection between the image and the prompt and the reasons behind the quote’s choice.
These are the some results created by our participants:
And the moral winner, Andrea, who wrote a truly pictoresque prompt:
