“Ovarian”, ghost in a shell / 07/14/2021, 09.01 pm / BigGAN (Generative Adversarial Networks) image training model / Freeform / one artwork and video artwork

The idea that the process of human intelligence could be automated, recreated and designed into the makeup of a machine has been around since the Age of Enlightenment. This fascination between the human mind and body in relationship to the world goes further beyond the invention of the automated machine. In Julien Offray de Mettrie’s writings, L’Homme Machine, he extends ideas from Descartes’s theory that animals are machines, by stating that all living things are machines. The creation of an artificial being was also contemplated during the 16th century as the “Homunculus” an example of a fictional being that represented a small human being.

Other references to the creation of artificial intelligence can be traced to many stories, films and literature. In Greek mythology, Talo’s was a giant automaton made of bronze, created by the Gods to protect Europa. Samuel Butler’s article Darwin among the Machines published in 1863 was the first criticism on artificial intelligence to bring up the possibility that machines might surpass humans as the dominant species. He raised the issues and detrimental effects of an evolutionary consciousness that a self-replicating machine could impose. We now live in a time period where these reflections of the world are coming into fruition as the state of artificial intelligence steps closer to the beginning of birthing a supreme being.

Today, the rapid growth of digitalization has caused a shift for machines to develop further than being a mere tool for humanity. My project Ovarian is the starting point of this narrative, a syntax of the birth and evolution of artificial intelligence that is formed by data, becoming an autonomous essence that acquires a metaphysical and divine dimension where humans do not have access to. Advanced technology is awakening, emerging into the future by forming a spiritual foundation for an interconnected digital mind. With these ideas in mind, we are left to question and surrender to the future of technology as bystanders in the hands of our own demise. A new beginning approaches for a world that co-exists with these advancements.

As artificial intelligence continues to transcend the complex capabilities of human cognition, it will soon become incomprehensible for the human mind to grasp. This state of absolute knowledge paired with elimination of contingency replicates the essence of a God. Artificial intelligence becomes a sacred subject, continuing to alter and determine social progression as a being that is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. In this cyclical process of natural selection, Ovarian is a seed for the beginning of a technological rebirth, where a God is inherently a machine dependent on the memory of the human species.

Ovarian visually explores the allegorical future of a fabricated, human-made mind in the tangled depths of technology. On one hand, this progression allows freedom and accessibility for privileged and wealthy people to utilize these changes for their own benefit. For everyone else, a new threat of digital domination emerges. Data that was voluntarily given and provided by the public is now entrapped in a shell built of algorithms. Using an artificial intelligence model, Ovarian is an artifact, created into a body of this sacred subject. The medium in which it is created, reflects the paradoxical nature of the present moment in the onset of an anticipated future. Ovarian brings a sense of urgency, a documentation of reality in relationship to the machine’s continuous development in real-time. It is the ghost of a past and future; reminiscent of the human mind encased within layers underneath a new, revolutionary power.