Synopsis
Commissioned for Accelerated Ad(E)vent: Subjectivity and Aesthetics Approaching the Singularity, presented by the Hyperstitional Research Syndicate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, Western University, 2024.
The video accompanies a conference paper by Nick Dyer-Witheford, reading Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts as a parable of resistance to singularity capitalism. The paper's full text is read aloud by ChatGPT, whose synthesized voice carries the argument which the video follows, showing the novel's world — the three astronauts, the blue fox, the Company's holding ponds — generated by the systems under discussion.
A metalogue is a conversation whose structure bears on its own subject: here the case against machine acceleration is delivered in a machine's voice, illustrated by machine imagery, at a workshop convened to think the Singularity. The video was screened at the event; the accompanying talk appears in the collection of the event's revised keynotes and responses, published by Miskatonic Virtual University Press and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism.
Dead Astronauts: Metalogue (2023)
Generative Video, 21:59
SELECTED STILLS
Full Video
Publication
Production
Stills generated with Midjourney and ChatGPT from the novel's descriptions, sequenced to the argument of Dyer-Witheford's conference paper; scenes animated and extended from the stills in RunwayML; voiceover synthesized with ChatGPT's text-to-speech from the paper's full text; edited and delivered as a single-channel video, 21:59.
The accompanying talk, delivered following the screening, takes Bateson's metalogue as its reference and, as its illustration, a full reading of "The Athenian Stranger, or God-Shaped Hole #2" — a speech composed for delivery to the artist's reading group, restaged as a demonstration of form-and-content integration.
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