Global Majority Award Winner 2022

Amaroid - Arjan Emmanuel Sanchez Guerrero (United Kingdom)

Artwork description

Amaroid inverts the traditional logic of the diorama and that of augmentation. In this project, a virtual-native object gets augmented within and beyond the screen, as an image that travels and transforms across time but also across different  materialities, from diegetic reality to non-diegetic reality: an augmented virtuality.

This project is not a paleontology (the study of ancient beings), but a sort of “neontology” (a study of beings to come) of the Latent Space –i.e. the space of lower dimensional representation of what an Artificial Neural Network has learned. It digs into the mechanics of the Latent Space, finding a fossil from a latent world and augmenting its nature. Originally generated by the BigGAN –an AI trained on the contemporary visual world– such fossilization shows a synthetic nature that grows from the remains of an organic one.

Every image generated by the BigGAN is the relief of a mathematical flatness. This project explores and entangles the techniques and the aesthetics of such a process.

Partners and collaborators

The sound design for A world is an object is a world was made by Yaka.