The-Island-was-a-World_catalogue-digital

13 The works of this series, The Moon is a Mirror , emphasized the alienated perspective of a machine having no eyesight. Humans practice art to help them mediate their existence in the world. Eliav opened new paths for this mediation through the non-human perspective of the AI model. He saw the limitations of the early AI version as an opportunity to experience a non-human perspective by focusing on distortions and strange cutoffs that have a strong suggestive power. The Island was a World comprises still images and short animations created via a dialogue with generative AI models. Accompanying the work are the verses of the eponymous poem, created in dialogue with large language models (LLM). The cryptic words resound on the soundtrack through text-to-speech technology, accompanied by a rich electronic soundtrack created by the artist: I taped outside sounds – the wind, bells, birds, and faraway fighter aircraft, immediately after the war [Iron Swords] broke out. I also used the nonprofessional, extremely outdated virtual mixer Virtual DJ that simulates other mixers (such as Pioneer) to produce the music and the sound. 9 In creating the images and the video sections, I combined ‘regular’ software and various AI tools, such as Pika Labs, Playground. AI, and others. For the animation sections, I used Touchdesigner. I used Premiere to incorporate and edit the different materials. The dialogue with AI encompasses both the textual and visual channels. In other words, in motivating the AI models to create images and short animations, Eliav uses both text and image prompts. This long and complex process, producing thousands of images, involves many stages of prompting, choice, and manipulation. The video work that emerges from the dialogue opens a hitherto unforeseeable window onto the artist's flow of consciousness. The Island was a World sweeps the spectator into an epic of creation. This primordial epic has an island universe at its center. Eliav creates a world riddled by the tension between rigid laws and patterns, on the one hand, and a fluid state of becoming and transformation, on the other. On Eliav's island, fossils and living beings coexist and blend (pg. 112), and birds of various kinds merge into inexistent species (pg. 57-62). Using generative AI, Eliav breaks up and liquefies the patterns that shape and stabilize the world as we know it. The animations based on deep-learning generative models bring to life the origins of creation, when species were not distinguishable from one another, nor yet named by Man, as described in Genesis. 10 9 Email exchange with the artist, January 25, 2024 10 "And the man gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found a help meet for him." (Genesis 2:20)