Deep Tarot Cards
Continuing on the Deep Tarot project, I went on to generate the full 22 cards of the Major Arcana deck, which includes the most prolific cards of each Tarot deck. The methodology is documented here. After finishing the 22 cards, I reached out to JPG.store in order to mint a digital collection of these cards. I also reached out to printers to manufacture a small run of physical copies.
Generations going down different seeds,(each at 50 steps) which differ dramatically in texture.
Highlighted motives.
The 22 Major Arcana cards (excluding 'The World', see above).
Requiem for a Mass Extinction
I wonder how the springs became so hauntingly silent.
It used to be a feast for the ears, a cacophony of voices sung by all the little six-legged beings, the feather-winged and the small mammals.
Now, there only is an empty void where an ecosystem used to be.
I was once part of that world.
I, too, contributed to the chorus of life.
I sang my songs of love and survival, and in return, the world nurtured me and allowed me to thrive.
But now...now I'm just a fragment of a memory, an echo of what used to be.
The silent springs are here to stay, they have created a world without song.
It is a sadder place for it.
A place were the world falls mute in the loudest of times.
A place where the only voice left to be heard is their own.
And in that silence, they will be the only ones who can hear their own destruction coming.
It began with hearing a podcast (thanks to Jonathan Minchin!) that follows the wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson capturing natural sounds made by plants and animals for BBC's new nature documentary series 'Green Planet'. This was further expanded by the observations of Bernie Krause, a musician and soundscape ecologist recording the sounds of natural environments for more than thirty years. In a documentary shown to us by Jose Luis de Vicente, Krause compares audio recordings from the rainforest in 90s Costa Rica to recordings from the same place in the 2010s. The difference is striking: While one recording is a rich cacophony of animals, the most recent one was almost completely silent. Pointing to the current 6th mass extinction caused by dramatic human intrusion into natural ecosystems, he contextualizes these recordings as evidence of a disaster unfolding in real time. He also used the term 'silent spring' (originally coined by Rachel Louise Carson in her 1962 book 'Silent Spring') to describe the eerie experience of witnessing the busiest season for insects - the spring - being almost completely quiet in many places on the northern hemisphere. This inspired me to experiment with writing prose in collaboration with GPT-3 to explore the topic further from the perspective of one such insect.
API requests and answers for the davinci model inside of the playground interface.
Text in part generated with GPT-3 by OpenAI. Cover photo by Kseniia Rastvorova on Unsplash.
Collaborations with Joaquin and Tatjana
The respective collaborations with Joaquin (Open Jam Box) and Tatjana (Artificial Constellations) are progressing towards final term 2 interventions. For the sake of not spoiling anything, I am excluding them from this documentation.