Concept Generator

Automated concepts for various creative endeavours & more.
If the rest of the market is automated, why not Art?

I was invited by Floating Reverie to be the April online residency and so taking cue from the brief ‘You have 2 weeks. 14 days. 336 hours. 20 160 minutes. What will you do?’, I decided to look at automation and content generation.

In our world's hyper-capitalist state we are driven to constantly produce. Whether artists, writers, office workers or labourers, our livelihood is dependent on what we produce and what can be consumed. Even as far as what we post and share on Facebook contributes to the almost $500 Billion dollar Big Data algorithm-driven market. Naturally with technological developments our society is tending more and more towards automation. Bots, artificial intelligence and algorithms are presenting us with tailored ways of living and doing the work so we can enjoy our lives.

Concept Generator can assist with producing any work of art, essay, exhibition proposal or ad campaign. Just click Generate Concept on the button below and you'll be provided with a nuanced, unconventional pairing of topics and a suggested execution. Using the simile (the critical theorist's favourite) as an entry point, Concept Generator pairs random abstract ideas so that you can re-approach that hot topic with a new lens.

For example, compare Mike Pepi's Is a Museum a Database?: Institutional Conditions in Net Utopia to Hito Steyerl's Is a Museum a Factory? - both pieces unpack our idea of The Museum but each with a different comparison, i.e, 'Museum as Database' or 'Museum as Factory'. The outcomes can be striking, predictable or very entertaining.

Online Residency: Floating Reverie

For my two-week residency, I will use my Concept Generator to produce concepts which I will try, test, hypothesise, imagine, manifest, explore and write about. Each day will involve a brief test to see how effective the generator is in generating interesting concepts. I will also edit the bot as I go, such as altering the language structure and updating the corpus.

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In her Floating Reverie catalogue, curator Carly Whitaker notes, “It is worth reading and reviewing Rautenbach’s //2Weeks in relation to his essay, Articulating Content, in the Conversations section of this publication (see page 40). This can be seen as his initial engagement with ‘content’, literally developing an algorithm to help him generate content. He generates a concept, a medium, or application and then—following the additional constraints set up—creates an artwork, drawing into question the art market and the content market. In his Post-Digital artwork, he sets up a manifesto and begins to critically engage with how we are situated in and amongst this content. In his essay Rautenbach comes full circle and expands on this.”

Day 1:

Nationalism as Hysteria questioned in a text piece

Day 2:

Philosophy as Dissonance achieved through a sculpture

Self_Proclaimed_Contrarian.png

Day 3:

Policy as Graveyard achieved through an exhibition

Museum of Bureaucratic Tendencies

Day 4:

Sympathy as Industrial Complex elaborated with a sculpture

And all I got was this lousy t-shirt

Day 5:

Gentrification as Language imagined as a performance

P.S. Don’t actually do this

Day 6:

Society as Dissonance made evident with a Google Search

Day 7:

Militarization as Culture expressed with a print

Day 8:

Object as Hegemony realised through an ad campaign

Day 9:

Nihilism as Casino demonstrated with a gif

Day 10:

Automation as Obedience manifested in a video

Obedience-related Bible verses but all mentions of God and Jesus are replaced with The Human. Posed as a screen recording mid-development because I like how game developers are little world creators in their own right. Not commentary Definitely something I'd like to develop into a much larger project one day when I have time.

Day 11:

Apolitical as Capital expressed as a digital collage