Milan Koerner-Safrata


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   Infinite State Machine
 @    milanimalism
   milan@scrnprnt.ca


  • b. 1993, Vancouver, Canada
  • Multimedia artist and designer
    of playful cybernetics




Morel’s Invention
2023, Generative Art



 Creative Coding, Software, AI
        In The Invention of Morel a fugitive becomes stranded on an island that houses a device capable of storing and replaying reality. He finds his way into the machine’s room, and is trapped by its persistent reprojection of the blue tiled walls. After learning to deconstruct it he decides to enter himself into the recording, dying as his soul is apparently captured in the process.

    Morel’s Invention reimagines my drawing practice in Processing, a common coding canvas. The program defines a three dimensional space populated with a series of “marks”, randomly selected, and in turn randomly “annotated” by a choice of lines, dots, text, or arrows. The palette, mark choice, frame size, randomness, and, timescale are exposed for the user to tune. In the fashion of early computer graphics the shape language is mostly geometric primitives, points, and lines. 

    At a time when large neural networks stand poised to automate artmaking, I looked to the earliest instantiations of computer generated art. Despite, or due to, their sophistication, image generation AI elides the difficulty of translating expression to protocol. In the brief interval of time between text prompt and outcome there is an absence. The neural network does not operate on our symbolic playing field. Objects are exploded into accumulations of vectors resolving into pixels, a probabalistic pointillism.  While the result is a great simulacrum, the creative process recedes over the horizon of human legibility. To code with basic 3D building blocks is an attempt to reveal the labour involved in capturing basic artistic processes algorithmically, and to recapture the human symbolic order in code.

    Bioy Casares was a lover of cinema, and the book is partly inspired by the silent film star Louise Brooks. Nonetheless he presages the alienation that will persist as videogames, virtual reality, generative AI attempt a facsimile of reality. This work is an infinitesimal attempt to deconstruct and insert myself into the machine.