"Remnants of Hyperreality: life sex death expenditure" is a collaboration between X. A. Li and Estlin Usher as Post Consumer Material and the poet Andrew J. Smyth, supported by the cclouds series at the University of Chicago. The image synthesis network iteratively constructs a visual representation of poetic phrases throughout Smyth's text.
By examining immense amounts of information, neural networks learn a general representation of the world. In forming the ability to perform as intended, however, these models also form an implicit ontology of meaning beyond that which is actively prescribed. In exploring the liminal spaces of how AI understands that which is not literal, Remnants of Hyperreality aims to unearth both the implications of our collective output and how this implied consensus is reflected into hyperreality by emerging technology.