Mood Themes the World - Jack Stenner and Gregory L. Ulmer
Channel: Jack Stenner
Date: 2022-09-10

Presentation delivered at Computer Art Congress 7, Geneva, Switzerland, September 2, 2022

Abstract:
Apparatus theory (a hybrid of McLuhan and Derrida) hypothesizes that a civilization of electracy (the digital apparatus) must learn how to thrive in a lifeworld in which the visceral faculty of appetite is hegemonic. The dominant axis of behavior today is fantasy-anxiety (attraction/repulsion). We propose that world theming has created a vernacular discourse that may be raised to a second power of expression as vehicle of visceral intelligence. The immediate claim is that theming in digital media augments mood (ambiance) into a power of imagination, just as dialectic in writing augmented logic into a power of reason. Fantasy today is persuasive, just as logical entailment is (was) in the rational order of literacy. Decisions determining real events today are being made in worlds of mood.

 World theming is evident in the vernacular art practices arising from recent advances in artificial intelligence. The availability of commodity GPUs, along with public access to advanced research via GitHub, Kaggle, Hugging Face, and the proliferation of forums such as Reddit, Discord, YouTube, and others, has resulted in a renaissance of public engagement with technology-informed creative practice. In addition, the general availability of Google's previously internal-only development tool, Colab, in late 2017 provided access to cloud-based GPUs and storage systems accessible only to data scientists and academics.

In early 2021 Ryan Murdock released a Colab notebook called Big Sleep that combined OpenAI's recently published Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) with BigGAN. This model is a paradigmatic example of our observation. By early 2022, multiple derivations of this process incorporated alternative image generation techniques. This paper will demonstrate how the fundamental basis of these methods are distinctly electrate in their use of "theme" and emphasis on "mood" in world-building, including a case-study animation called Dissipative Off-ramps.