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The images in Next door neighbor started their digital life as files saved on the DVR of a real neighbor, an IRL found footage source. The covert gathering of visual information by CCTV seems a familiar environment to working with stable diffusion et al, a similarity of methodology, just another machine assigned to the automatic gathering of information.
Utilizing stable diffusion and Runway ML this original set of images is reprocessed into a new dataset.
There is something voyeuristic about this process. The supercomputer is trying to make sense of things, putting similar things together, separating different things, perhaps it’s just a dumb collagist. i feel the weight of a supermassive engine – the sum of years, decades, generations of *crowdsourced data. I am involved in an unlicensed, ungoverned, and unpermissioned sharing – a radically covert access.
Working in the ‘latent space’ is working in a stolen space, accessing things without permission. The space on the other side of a neighboring wall. The space that we don’t have access to, that which is hidden from view.
The result seems to retain an element of covertness, I often had to use negative prompting to stop the brain from being naughty and spying too much, slap the invisible hand of the peeping tom – it seems very comfortable in the practice of the invasion of privacy.
“…the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form…whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent.” Naomi Klein
Archive: Next door neighbor, Bangkok 2015:
