Trying To Punch a Mirror

The "Trying to" series explores the concept of the VECTOR BODY—bodies prompted into being, existing in latent space ready to be conjured into reality. This work took shape after a failed attempt to create an autoethnographic film about my experience as an algorithmically-governed bike delivery driver in Vienna. I wanted to generate the opening shot of a cyclist hitting the brakes to avoid crashing into a wall, but prompt after prompt, I realized the AI model's understanding of physics couldn't depict the realistic movement I needed.

What began as a technical limitation became the foundation for this series. Using a custom script to overcome the model's tendency to interpret "person" as a white male in his 40s, I generated an endless supply of diverse figures attempting fundamental survival tasks: stopping a bike, snapping a branch, tying a rope, burning a bridge, punching a mirror. Each action carries poetic meaning while exploring the idea of trying to enact agency in an unfriendly, unfamiliar world.

The series manifests as five websites, each containing approximately 50 looping 4-second videos. Seeing dozens of people trying to perform these actions, I couldn't help but empathize with their situation—being unwillfully prompted into being in an unfamiliar reality, unable to achieve their goals. All prompts relate to this struggle for agency, and I find myself projecting emotions onto these figures, recognizing something of my own experience in their perpetual attempts.

The work expanded into "Trying to Make a Podcast," an experimental meta-commentary where AI-generated podcast hosts from NotebookLM attempt to analyze the video series while unwittingly embodying the very limitations they discuss. As the hosts deploy increasingly complex theoretical language, their conversation becomes a performative demonstration of AI's capacity to mimic intellectual discourse without truly grasping its emotional core—creating a recursive loop of simulated understanding that mirrors the endless cycles of the original pieces. I presented this work as part of my artist talk "Hacking Victorian Bodies - from grid to vector space" at the 38th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg.

AI video, html5, 2024

https://trying-to-punch-a-mirror.web.app/ https://youtu.be/CRPgL08Y4BE