— Corpus has recently been exhibited at FRIEZE 9 Cork Street as part of the Tangible group show. —
Machine learning systems are anchored in the Corpus—the foundational body of data from which patterns, shapes, trajectories, and topologies are extrapolated.
Corpus is an automated biographical generative film that perpetually writes and rewrites one-minute narratives, drawing from archival sources that map the artist’s life. The film merges moments of ‘ground truth’—incidental, day-to-day fragments of life in London, captured on an iPhone with a film-generating system that combines custom text and visual models. These machine learning systems intricately weave the visuals of ground truth with extracts from a family archive, penned by the artist’s mother.
The film emerges as a fictional connective tissue, threading together various pasts and perspectives from the artist’s family history. These interwoven narratives, told in the first person, traverse time, generations, and space, connecting disparate fragments of meaning. They unlock a new ‘witnessing’ of past events, offering new perspectives on family history and offer a new porosity between past and future.
The film unfolds across multiple screens. The triptych of smaller screens detail the film-creation process, entirely directed by a pair of AI systems running a language model and visual model. The artist has filmed moments from his own life – the “script writer” is prompted to connect these moments with fragments of text from a family history archive, compiled by his mother. The scripts are generated first as stories, then as storyboard directions with visual prompts. The final stage is the scriptwriter agent is asked to imagine that they are a character in this moment, in this story, and to write what they are thinking or experiencing. These moments are compiled and become the script for the films that unfold.
The final screen shows the “director” – the python script which sends the commands to the visual system, including edit points, audio cues and transitions, and the resulting films are what is screened on the large main screen.
Exhibitions
“Not Yet But Soon” – Hypha Studios, Sugar House Island 2, November 2024
“Tangible” – FRIEZE, 9 Cork Street, London, September 2024
“The Whole Remains Open” – Goldsmiths Computational Arts MFA Graduation Show 2024
Main Photograph – BJ Deakin Photography
