Soundwalk Walking piece details
The Imaginary Drift is a series of audio works that have arisen out of daydreams of travel to far off lands during the isolation experienced because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our seclusion indoors, is interrupted only by the briefest of walks outside for essentials such as food, through a world that seems familiar, yet is uncannily different. Using various online and compiled text generators based on OpenAI’s GPT-2 language model, texts are generated to describe various macroscopic and miscroscopic worlds. The AI, together with an initial human iput seeding the generated texts, produces scripts for spoken word descriptions of dreamlike spaces and imaginary walks.
Alan Dunning is a new media and installation artist and founding member of the interdisciplinary art and science collaboration, the Einstein’s Brain Project. In partnership with the Project and individually he has an extensive Canadian and international exhibition record and is represented in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NY and the National Gallery of Canada. Awards include grants from the Daniel Langlois Foundation, SSHRC, the Canada Council, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. References to his work and research include: Interartive 100: Walking Art/Walking Aesthetics, Caroline Langill’s project for Fondation Langlois, “Shifting Polarities”, Anna Munster’s “Materializing New Media”, and “Future Bodies”, Edward Shanken’s “Art and Electronic Media”, Ted Hiebert’s, “Digital Inflections” for CTheory, Kate Hayles’ “Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments”, “and Mark Hansen’s “New Philosophy for New Media”. He currently lives and works in Victoria, BC, Canada.
Credits
Hosted by: Drifting bodies - Fluent Spaces, walking arts encounters/conference, Guimaraes (Portugal) - Made of Walking (VII)
