The-Island-was-a-World_catalogue-digital

12 Oren Eliav, The Island was a World This video work springs from his intriguing dialogue with several AI models. He enlists them as creative partners and as stimulants of du Sautoy's "jolt." Like early computer artists, such as Noll and Molnar, Eliav harnesses the capacity of an AI model to produce an unending flow of images and texts. He enters into an inexhaustible dialogue with them based on triggers and suggestions that keep feeding themselves. The Island was aWorld is the product of a complex, multi-layered process that feeds on the capacities of generative adversarial networks, deep-learning models, and others to generate enormous numbers of variations on a motif, like an expanded and empowered flow of consciousness. The artist says that the process requires great precision in directing the models and fine-tuning the flow of images toward the desired result. Eliav's dialogue with AI began in his 2022 project, The Moon is a Mirror at Braverman gallery, Tel Aviv. At the series' center stood a poem he wrote, and he responded to the AI images by painting them in oil on canvas. He said that the GAN model generates a "string of images" that has "a kind of genetic logic since each image is capable of 'giving birth' to a new image of itself, or by coupling with one of several other images. Every new image results from a statistical calculation that extracts it from an expanse of possibilities, and its potential remains concealed until the moment of calculation at the artist's request." The Moon is a Mirror, 2022, Braverman Gallery