Abysslips

Year

2023 — ongoing

Form

A practice, and the library that carries it

Proposed

Libidinal Geometries and the Problem of Emergent Art, §4.5, 2023

Integrates

Contingent Determinacies, Landscapes of Pain, Transfigurations of G-code

Reading

abyss lips · abyss slips

The thesis envisions a whole process, in a project proposal: “the artist creates and connects frameworks of the algorithmic libidinal while simultaneously emanating 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 intrinsic curiosity. The same agents scan the simulated physical environment of the 3D printer and learn the grammar of its G-code, enabling the figural in the discursive 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 an ideal four-dimensional arousal but 3D-printed material expressions of multi-dimensional libidinal processes.

The name is a nod to Nietzsche’s stare into the abyss, and to lips as a sensuous interface. Read as abyss lips, it holds the depths of sensuous environments and their connection to algorithmic articulation. Misread as abyss slips, it points to unpredictable and undesired outcomes, and to the possibility of slipping into the abyss in its existential resonance. The title carries an error — a missing space between two words — as a nod to Freud’s parapraxes, and so to errors as the productive element in the unconcealment of the unknown in data, in machine learning, and in desire itself.

Over the following three years each of its conditions was built out separately, and for its own reasons. Contingent Determinacies was reimplemented in Rust, to learn the language as much as the algorithm. Biosignal capture arrived through work made with another artist. The G-code agents ran in simulation. A repository that began as one project became a multi-modal framework, and then the ground beneath several works at once.

“Fragile (as infrathin and ana-material) folding (in continuous pedetic corporeal flows) figural (as the expression of the libidinal).”