The whole process is envisioned in the project proposal *Abysslips*, a playful nod to Nietzsche’s “stare into the abyss” and lips as a sensuous “interface”.[A reference points simultaneously to the specific aphorism 146 and the whole system of deep introspection and its meaning in Nietzsche. The aphorism is found in @Nietzsche1966, p.89] Read as *abyss lips* it embodies abyssal depths of sensuous environments and their connections to multi-dimensional algorithmic articulations, highlighting the transformative and agential nature of the abyss. Misread as *abyss slips*, it points to depths of unpredictable, undesired outcomes and potential dangers of such an implementation, revealing a possibility of slipping into the abyss in its existential resonance and nihilistic nature. *Abysslips* entails an error, a missing space between the title’s words, as another nod, this time towards Freud’s concept of “parapraxes”, better known as Freudian slips.[According to Freud, *parapraxes* are not random mistakes but errors that reveal unconscious desires or thoughts, manifesting in the *unconcealment* of the repressed. See @Freud1966, p.220-222.] It points towards errors as the productive elements of the process of *unconcealment* of the unknown in data, complex machine learning methods, and desire itself.
In *Abysslips* the artist creates and connects frameworks of the algorithmic libidinal and simultaneously emanates sentient libidinal force, captured via biometric sensors in a mathematical tensor, forming a computational sensuous environment. Situated in this environment, agents of advanced reinforcement learning explore it through deep neural networks, learning through self-play and their intrinsic curiosity. The same agents scan the simulated physical environment of the 3D printer and learn the grammar of its G-code to enable the figural in the discoursive flow of the 3D-printing process. Connecting two bifurcated environments, they translate four-dimensional events and flows into three-dimensional expressions of G-code and 3D-printer movement. The resulting sculptures are not copies of ideal four-dimensional arousal but 3D-printed material expressions of multi-dimensional libidinal processes. While the project’s complete implementation is beyond this research’s scope, the necessary algorithmic, philosophical, and material conditions for the project’s implementation are already made.
It would be an overstretch to claim that the implementation proposed above is a straightforward, smooth process yielding results comparable to the success of deep reinforcement agents in game environments. Perhaps even a bigger overstretch is believing that a single biometric sensor can capture all intricacies of arousal or any other inner mental state. However, the crude implementation of a crude sensual environment allows the flow of the libidinal force, its modulation generating its new libidinal expressions, a process previously accessible only to sentient beings. Libidinal geometry produces conditions that enable the emergence of an encounter of human and algorithmic agents, not as pre-established entities in the libidinal but as intensities and trajectories of the libidinal.