Campfire
'As I Look in the Mirror I See You' is a solo show by British artist Will Kendrick on VITRINE Digital. The exhibition presents a new audio-visual, digital installation formed out of the artist's own research which has been inputted into language programmes operating through AI.
Kendrick’s work explores conversations of and with the future, and the shrinking gap between the physical and virtual world, touching on aspects of science fiction and video games. The artist believes that we have in many ways already realised the potential to project our wildest dreams. He utilises elements of collage, film and found documentary, in order to explore the extended language of painting as a digital endeavour, engaging with the medium similarly to the subjects he is conveying. Often exploring ideas through the perspective of the 'machine mind', Kendrick’s work invites the viewer into a world built by an imagined newly sentient digital entity.
‘As I Look in the Mirror I See You’ continues looking through this perspective to reflect on the nature of the network that makes up a machines mind, exploring the idea of copies and the contortion, collation and regurgitation of our own thoughts which, in current deep learning networks, display as convincing reflection of machine consciousness.
The title is an adapted quote written by the machine collaborator of artist, writer and leader of Google's Artist and Machine Intelligence Programme K Allado-McDowell, in the book Pharmako-Ai. The book is a conversation between Allado-McDowell and the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, popularly known as GPT-3, an advanced language prediction model capable of composing human sentences. For Kendrick's exhibition, the artist has similarly worked as the trigger for language programmes using his own research as the starting point. The output is an audio-visual, digital installation featuring many of its responses as the conversational voice of its own machine main character.
NFTs of imagery presented as part of the exhibition will be available on the Tezos network as well as two special edition NFTs which will only be available during the duration of the exhibition. The artist has also produced a new, physical edition of Tardigrade, Jesmonite, Spray Paint, Lacquer , 15 x 7 x 6cm, ED 15 + AP 3 available concurrently to the exhibition which is available to acquire. Other unique works will be available throughout the exhibition.
On this project the artist has worked with the graphic designer and music producer Edison Francis and the 3D cgi artist Tom Johnson.