Using an unsupervised OpenAI GPT-2 model (*), I generated a series of stories starting from the sentence: “We finally sent Elon, Jeff and Bill to another planet”. The deliberately ironic prompt refers to the space ventures of Musk, Bezos, and Gates, often presented — in different ways — as strategies to secure the future of humanity.
What emerged were dreamlike, unstable narratives full of unexpected associations, apocalyptic scenarios, and recurring motifs, often shot through with psychoanalytic undertones, particularly around the figure of the mother and an uneasy relationship with the feminine.
The generated texts unfold within a latent space shaped by narrative drift and repetition, where fantasies of space colonization coexist with techno-utopian promises.
Flash Fictions on Alternative Networks
One of these stories was combined with footage from a Blue Origin rocket launch for Flash Fictions on Alternative Networks, a web-based project curated by The Photographer’s Gallery, London. The resulting montage creates a disorienting juxtaposition between terrestrial landscapes and extraterrestrial imaginaries.
For the benefit of all humanity, video and self-generated text, 2021
For the Benefit of All Humanity is a video work based on another generated story, combining images of space exploration with fragments of language drawn from OpenAI’s stated mission to develop artificial intelligence “for the benefit of all humanity”.
The work stages the narratives emerging from the model alongside the ambitions of tech billionaires to “save humanity”, whether through space colonization or the development of a “beneficial” artificial intelligence.
In this overlap, the rhetoric of salvation takes on an ambiguous tone, oscillating between technological optimism and underlying fantasies of escape and control. The narratives often drift into excess and inconsistency, producing moments of unintended irony.
The video culminates in a repetitive sequence, a form of hallucination in which language loops, fixates, and begins to unravel, caught in an endless iteration that is at once absurd and unsettling.
(*) implemented as TextSynth by Fabrice Bellard