Esther - xenodataset

We are facing a cultural hole created by a compilation of lacks:

The lack of counterculture. Until today counterculture served as a means to envision alternative futures. However, as it happens with phenomena like grunge, techno, or queer movements, capitalism has demonstrated a remarkable ability to commodify them as commercial content. Living in the times of crowd generated imagery and automated cognition (Hayles, 2017): what form could the cultural avant-garde take?

The lack of imagination. We can not think without imagining since imagination is the mediation from the outside world to the inside (Picón, et al., 2021). The definition of imagination in medieval mysticism was "thinking with images". The contemporary imagination definition has mutated to “the capacity to represent possibilities other than present possibilities” (Picón. D, et al., 2024). Therefore a lack of imagination connects with a lack of other possible futures (Fisher, 2016).

Lack of perspective. In one of his letters Socrates expressed his concern about the impact of writing on human memory and dialectical capacities (Bonde, 2023). Then came the concerns around the printed press ending with architecture (Hugo, 1840). Meanwhile writing and printing gave birth to imaginative pleasures like reading science fiction books. How should we understand now that in 2023 The Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting (2024) is extremely concerned about AI ending with the work of book illustrators?

Lack of something new. The contemporary technological corpus tends toward the trendy. This has been identified in most cases as very boring and in some cases as cultural bias. If you ask an AI to generate an image of a futuristic world it will give you the all time cliches. This is because AI models are trained to generate content similar to their training dataset, and datasets are boring. What if we stop this procedural animism of treating tools as entities (Akinina, 2022)? What if we stop understanding bias as something we can unlearn? (Nguyên, 2024).

In our search for other imaginaries, we will need “other images”. There are plenty invisibilised images, different from what we normally see. Some artistic approaches are proposing images of the Weird as alternatives to the sterile nature of current content. Understanding Weird as an indicator of the absence, that is to say, of that which has been repressed, forgotten, or ignored (Fisher, 2018). The aesthetics of the Weird are letting us rescue concepts like “xeno” from the pejorative and moralistic visions where they were sinking (Goh, 2019). The entities represented in weird imaginaries can only be monsters since the term “monster”, derived from "monere", refers to the manifestation of aspects that society tends to avoid, thereby neglecting intrinsic revelations.

The real value of the term xeno is the lack of classifying criteria. In a resetting approach to biased machines, the only real unlearning process (Nguyên, et al. 2022) will need datasets of the Weird (Ọnụọha, 2024). These alterations of normative imagery into xenoimages is being done by hacking generative protocols, allowing algorithmic apophenia or prompting with invented languages (XenoVisual Studies, 2024). Unclassifiable image datasets are the trigger to other possible imaginaries.

References

Anikina, A. (2022). Procedural animism. A peer-reviewed journal about --, 11(1), 134-151. https://doi.org/10.7146/aprja.v11i1.134311

Nguyên, T. T., Huynh, T. T., Nguyen, P. L., Liew, A. W., Yin, H., & Nguyen, Q. V. H. (2022). A survey of machine unlearning. arXiv (Cornell University). https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2209.02299

Fisher, M. (2016). Capitalist Realism. [Realismo Capitalista]. Buenos Aires, Caja Negra.

Fisher, M. (2018). The Weird and the Eerie. [Lo raro y lo Espeluznante]. Buenos Aires, Caja Negra.

XenoVisual Studies (2024, 11th January). XenoVisualStudies. https://xenovisualstudies.com/

Ọnụọha, M. (2024, 1st January). The Library of Missing Datasets. MIMI ỌNỤỌHA. https://mimionuoha.com/the-library-of-missing-datasets

Picón, D., Castro, J., & Rocío, D. (2021, noviembre). La imaginación (temporada ELR171). Recuperado 8 de enero de 2024, de https://open.spotify.com/episode/4hEYgzMJj43jN2j4Hnj8Ue?si=66eef3748744404a

Hayles, N. Katherine (2017) Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

Bonde, N. (2023) Sociedades Algorítmicas. Conferencia CCCB (citar bien)

Hugo, V. (1840). Nuestra señora de París [Notre-dame de Paris]. Edelvives.

Goh, A. (2019). Appropriating the Alien: A critique of Xenofeminism. Mute. https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/appropriating-alien-critique-xenofeminism