The Machine in the World of Platonic Forms

Do Universals Exist? Both western and Indian philosophies have been very concerned with how we intuitively form universal concepts (like blackness or even numbers for instance) when all we have access to are objects that are similar or dissimilar in several ways. Plato, for instance, famously concluded the only reason we think something is beautiful is because ‘Beauty’ actually exists in the world of ideal forms! But this is a debate that is still ongoing. A question i try to pose with this artwork is- how would a machine understand a universal quality, given all it sees are examples. The images it produces tell us something about our own selves, refracted through the alien eye of the machine looking at the way we attach words to the world!

Here, i use Attn GAN to create the work, an AI model that uses a massive database of images with captions (like “facade of an old shop”) to learn verbal-visual connections. It is then trained to produce images for sentences it has never seen before. In particular, it is asked to produce images that correspond to sentences like “This is white” or “This is black” which elicit from it its visual representation of universal qualities like ‘old’, ‘young’, ‘black’, ‘white’ etc. Each column pair represents one such universal notion and and its opposite. The overall collection of images is reminiscent of
Beeple’s famous ‘Everydays: the first 5000 Days,’ bringing to the fore the aesthetic of multiplicity (often inherent to digital art, especially AI and generative art) here created through human-machine partnership.

This work was inspired by conversations with 64/1 (Karthik Kalyanaraman & Raghava KK).