A Filter in the Shape of Us (2024)

The artist of my memory is crafting hazy recollections into non-existent eyes. How do we get the pictures into the mind? Our eyes are an interface. It’s more than an eye, though, isn’t it? It’s a filter — a filter shaped like a body. A filter in the shape of us.

I am not sure that everybody looks at the eyes. I’m fascinated by looking at AI images, and the slow deterioration of plausibility that occurs from holding a gaze. Of course, the gaze is also directed toward us, in the ways that AI is built on a backbone of surveillance. Look at these images and you see eyes, but look long enough and you see unnatural breaks.

This is a sequence from a larger work in progress, Human Movie (so named to match the trend line of everything being assigned “human” as a modifier for things only humans can do: human writing, human art, etc. The film revolves around fragments of text I’ve written, a series of short meditations on compression algorithms. I’m trying to think through the metaphors of artificial intelligence systems as they reflect human thought, memory, and experience.

Often these metaphors are invoked without attention to themselves as metaphors. This is unfortunate because metaphors are the vehicles of poetic and associative thought. The poetry of the AI system is hard to get at. It requires a blend of ironic distance to find the overlap between the machine and the mind. We have to ask what it means to call these copies of the mind, to evoke the distinctions, the difference that emotion makes to experience. So I wanted to make a film exploring artificial intelligence exclusively through its metaphors, to recenter the human at the heart of them.

The non-existent eyes here are the images we write into our head when we recall past events. A Filter In the Shape of Us is the second part of a segment:

Are we artists of memory, crafting hazy recollections into nonexistent eyes? I've heard that memory is reconstructed, not recalled... that we rewrite the past onto the mind rather than opening them up like files in a lost hard drive. Could it be true? That every memory is as false as a photograph?