THE INFINITE GUIDE

30 Aug – 01 Sept FACT Workshop /

30 Aug – 09 Sept WWW.THEINFINITE.GUIDE /

01-09 September KARST Exhibition /

A SPECULATIVE ART WORK AND RESEARCH PROJECT, POWERED BY A CONVERSATIONAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

“Although today’s technologists, in their sober pursuit of utility, power, and profit, seem to set society’s standard for rationality, they are driven also by distant dreams, spiritual yearnings for supernatural redemption. However dazzling and daunting their display of worldly wisdom, their true inspiration lies elsewhere, in an enduring, other-worldly quest for transcendence and salvation.”

(Noble, 1993) 

The Infinite Guide is a speculative art work and research project, powered by a conversational Artificial Intelligence, (a natural language human-computer interface). It took place simultaneously online and at KARST in Plymouth, UK.

The work is grounded in the proposition that as the complexity and power of intelligent systems expand beyond human comprehension, faith is necessarily reintroduced. This positions the computational system as an ideological and mythic incarnation of an emergent artificial spiritual guide. A guide residing in cathedrals of computation (Bogost, 2015). A technological future forged in the naïve, biased and diversity challenged furnace of silicon valley, if left unchallenged.

The project was conceived and developed by the i-DAT Collective, with Crumb SolutionsIntercityStory Juice and a group of young people facilitated though FACTKARST and PSCA.