The first line of the description for this video art installation is “a video game that plays itself.” It plays live like an infinite dream sequence of Talus Twenty Nine, an artificial intelligence being who oversees the terrain. Each time the program is run, something different happens, much like the spontaneity of a human life.
The ongoing nature of the algorithm shows how AI can be programmed to interact in a way like humans, but feels ultimately repetitive and limited. Although the sequence was different every time the program is run, it was still the same ingredients all senselessly interacting. It serves the gallery space well because it can be something to ponder for a moment then carry on, still mostly absorbing the piece. I felt that after 12 minutes it was starting to feel like I wanted to move on. Using AI and technology to help humans process data, numbers, and store things makes sense to me, but teaching computers to do human things like dreaming and imagining seems dangerous and, at this point, way inferior than our own imaginations. What was lacking in the work was any semblance of a narrative, and so it could never feel truly human, but should we be trying to build technology that is as human as us?