Uncanny Abstractions (Inside the Black Box)

A visualization of the mysterious and opaque higher-order abstractions operating within the black box of AI. Found stock photographs of camera parts were manually composited to make a digital collage in Photoshop. The collage was then used as an input image into DALL-E 2 accompanied by the simple prompt “camera parts”. Each collection of camera parts itself represents a physically instantiated abstraction of its respective camera. By merging parts from each collection, the input collage is an uncanny human-made abstraction suggesting the latent composition of these disparate elements. It suggests the concrete but uninstantiated: the a priori synthetic. Four output images were selected from hundreds of candidates and themselves composited in Photoshop. The input and output images were then animated in PhotoMosh to imagine the translation and transformation of one into the other across different levels of abstraction. By never clearly showing the input or output images themselves, the loop traps us within the hidden layers inside the black box of AI.