Sascha Pohflepp – Recursion

Recursion (2016). A text created by a custom artificial intelligence system that had been given a wide variety of texts on humanity to learn, ranging from encyclopedic articles on our biology and sociality to works from psychology, philosophy and pop culture. It was then asked to author its own text, starting with the word “human.”

In the resulting video, an individual (Erika Ostrander) reads the synthetic mind’s inferences, in the process creating a feedback loop between the universal machines and ourselves; wondering whether—in the words of theorist Benjamin H. Bratton—”the real uncanny valley” might be one “in which we see ourselves through the eyes of an [artificial] other?”

Recursion, Custom trained recurrent neural network, HD video (2:00 min)
Performed by Erika Ostrander, 2016

Video Courtesy of Sascha Pohflepp