Lost in Machine Hallucinations.

The schism between the digital and the real is closing. Technologies progress and bring pixels closer to atoms. Despite this increasing verisimilitude, there is a constant and inherent discourse on authenticity in the translation of the real to the digital, reducing objects, images and experiences to digits, to ones and zeros. The machine’s manner of seeing the world is skewed, distorted by its nature of observation in the same way organic vision is prone to bias and distortion. These machine hallucinations present themselves when objects are transposed from the material to the digital.

This exhibition takes the Corinthian capital and its associated ideas of reproduction, classical order and proportion, and presents a taxonomy of denigration and corruption of the original under a series of distortion verbs. An object and subject of the orthographic age, the capital and its ghosted column and entablature are represented in a post-orthographic manner and present this liminal object through the lens of post-orthographic analysis – error, copy, variation, scale, ambiguity, authorship.

The origin object, itself a downloaded photogrammetry artefact, is rescanned under controlled parameters, incrementally altered to confuse the machine reading of reality — distortion verbs, or adjustments to the image are its focal length, level of noise and digital warping of the jpeg.

With a depleting rendering of authenticity, the exhibition displays the capital as that which is lost in machine hallucination.