The trace is not only the disappearance of origin — within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow — it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin” – Jacques Derrida
“Seven apertures open / Producing myriad species” – Li Daochun
“Every utterance must be regarded as primarily a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere [..] Each utterance refutes affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account “ – Mikhail Bakhtin
Drawing inspiration from Jacque Derrida’s notion of the trace, Li Daochun’s vision of apertures, cosmological fragments, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic thought, AI Traces explores the shifting boundaries and margins of authorship and transformation in an age of artificial intelligence.
In the traditional art world, a layer of varnish once sealed a painting in a both physical and symbolical gesture of completion and preservation, a final, transparent marking.
In today’s digital realm, by contrast, nothing ever truly settles. Images, texts, and sounds circulate in continuous loops of revision, deletion, remix, distortion, and re-creation.
The “end” of one exhibition becomes the beginning of a new.
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The background canvas for Moons, Castles, Trees | AI Chronotopes was composed from a single low-resolution photograph of a microscopic pigment fragment extracted by researchers at the Getty Conservation Institute from Edgar Degas’ Dancers Practicing in the Foyer.
The image was subjected to fourteen iterations of digital editing mirroring the fourteen layers of paint Degas applied over three decades to the painting.
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One stage of the journey is over, another begins.
More information to follow …