CONES OF UNCERTAINTY
Alice Bucknell explores novel metaphors for grappling with the forces of artificial superintelligence (ASI).
Her talk reconsiders our relationship with both AI and the climate crisis, as artificial systems and supercharged weather events evolve and mutate beyond our predictions. In climate forecasting, a 'cone of uncertainty' is a visual representation of the probable path and intensity of an extreme weather event; looking something like a comma or headlight beam, this path becomes increasingly dilated and ghost-like as it unfurls over space and time. Bucknell expands on this as both a nonlinear, expanded approach to climate modelling and a metaphor for recent advances in generative AI. Bucknell reveals the complex reality of superstorms - both environmental and artificial - that hover close on our shared horizon, helping us to think of both AI and extreme weather events as entangled, multiscalar issues.
Drawing on advances in climate modelling and her own experiments with The New Real's platform, Bucknell presents a new video project stemming from her research. This video, a fictional climate broadcast set in 2097 (the last available year of Copernicus climate predictions in TNR’s platform), draws on linguistic experiments made with TNR’s Word2vec feature. The output of these experiments were then used as prompts in text and image generators including GPT-3 and a custom Stable Diffusion model trained on the storm paths crossing Florida, the artist's home state, over the last 100 years. The resulting narrative, spoken by a speculative ASI-powered meteorologist, charts a new poetics for visualizing and speaking about the future possibilities of hurricane forecasting through nonhuman intelligence.
Bucknell compares ways of knowing the world, in the probabilistic information that comes from climate modelling, and the role of language in shaping our relationship to ASI and a changing climate. Bucknell’s research reveals a 'feedback loop' between The New Real’s platform and its Word2vec model and commercially available text-to-image models. Adding to the discussion of the theme of "Uncanny Machines", Bucknell points to the radical disturbance of both extreme climate events and developments in AI, and how a creative use of intersecting AI tools can help us grapple with the stakes of the unfolding climate crisis and future evolutions of AI.
Artist Talk, by Alice Bucknell
About the artist
Alice Bucknell is a North American artist, writer, and curator based in London and Los Angeles. Working primarily through game engines and speculative fiction, her work explores interconnections of architecture, ecology, magic, and non-human and machine intelligence. In 2021, she founded New Mystics, a collaborative platform merging magic and technology with texts co-written by the Language AI GPT-3. In 2022, she organized the event series New Worlds at Somerset House in London.
She has exhibited her work internationally, including recent and upcoming presentations in “I’ll Be Your Mirror” at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, “Open Systems: Open Worlds” at Singapore Art Museum, the 2023 and 2019 Venice Architecture Biennales, Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Deep Thought at 3hd Festival in Berlin, Ars Electronica, and Serpentine Galleries. Her writing appears often in art and design publications including ArtReview, Flash Art, Frieze, e-flux Architecture, Mousse, and The Architectural Review.
Bucknell is currently an Associate Lecturer in MA Narrative Environments, part of the Spatial Practices program at UAL, and she has given talks at SCI-Arc in LA, Fabrica in Italy, and the V&A in London. In 2023, she will be a Supercollider SciArt Ambassador and resident at transmediale in Berlin. She studied Anthropology and Visual Art at the University of Chicago and Critical Practice at the Royal College of Art in London.