Catastrophic Forgetting - #23

While the Surrealists of the 1920s aimed to free the mind by painting their portrayal of dreams and the unconscious, Catastrophic Forgetting discovers a new depiction of automatism through the use of artificial intelligence. The technology’s process of generating images from vast datasets creates what might be called a "machine unconscious" – a space where cultural symbols, ranging from ancient myths to internet memes, merge and transform freely, unrestricted by human logic or preconceptions. For these works, Kusano has trained the AI to learn from iconography of contemporary popular culture where eastern and western symbols have repeatedly reinterpreted each other – creating a cross-cultural surrealism that reflects the pace at which pop influence crosses the world today, and the challenge of making sense of it.

Catastrophic Forgetting takes its name from the neural network phenomena where AI systems lose existing information while learning new data – and the series similarly explores the memory loss that humans experience in our information-saturated world. Today, even historically significant events quickly disappear from public attention, let alone the countless new cultural and visual references that we witness minute-to-minute, and that inevitably escape our memory. Through the works in this series, the machine offers back new synthesis of the references that we thought were lost.

Here, the specific creative process employs a multi-stage generative approach, repeatedly reconstructing and combining images through machine learning algorithms that instigate the so-called errors of the series’ namesake phenomena. This process reflects how cultural information is transmitted, translated, and often distorted – creating unprecedented amalgamations beyond human imagination, but within recognition. Through this AI-driven surrealism, these works present visions from the machine's dream state to ultimately surface evidence from our own unconscious states, and suggests new possibilities for how artificial and human consciousness might intersect and evolve. Through this examination, the machine-generated dreams of Catastrophic Forgetting convey a lasting and visceral dialogue between memory, reality and cultural influence in thise current digital age.

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Catastrophic Forgetting
2024