deus X mchn

media-installation 2017
printer with wi-fi module / speaker / CCTV-camera / projectors / screens / lightbox / server/ self-developed software / neural network
This project explores the issue of online security within the Internet of Things (IoT), and the increasing capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this project, an AI (an LSTM-neural network possessing a long short-term memory) has been taught the language contained within a corpus of sacred texts such as The Old and The New Testament, Quran, Torah, Dhammapada, Ramayana, Tao TeChing, and others. It perceives the text as a sequence of numbers (encoded symbols). The AI performs Big Data computations based on the texts in order to discover their grammatical structures, i.e. the «code» of the language. Eventually, this neural network starts to generate its own «sacred» text, creating new words and revealing the universal poetics of religious writings.
Another neural network uses this text to synthesize a human voice which becomes the voice of different unsecured devices connected to the Internet of Things. Hacked IP-cameras with speakers start reciting this (pseudo-religious) text to unsuspecting users; audio files containing the text are left on people's media-servers for them to be discovered; finally, these texts are simultaneously printed once every 15 minutes both on an IP-printer in the exhibition space and on a randomly chosen device somewhere in the world.A series of photographs automatically taken by a script which takes random screenshots from IP-cameras are also exhibited as part of the project.

Credits:

Valentin Fetisov
Vasily Klenov