environment built for absence (an unofficial/artificial sequel to J.G. Ballard's "High Rise")

In our post-digital lives, how often are experiences of urban landscapes mediated through technology? As we move through a city for the first time, the impressions are already joined by pre-existing impressions from Google Maps and cultural images of other cities, making the divide between human and machine cognition blurry and uncanny. In this video we see photogrammetric documentation of the gradual erosion of a modernist high-rise, merged with the voice of a machine learning system trained on the works of writer J.G. Ballard. Given the complete corpus of Ballard’s texts—over 1.5 million words from articles, novels, and short stories —this A.I., or recurrent neural network, emulates the vocabulary, style, and tone of Ballard’s writing. Furthermore, the words are triggered through images from the video using computer vision. By searching for the poetic, the abstract and the absurd nature of these systems, Tivon Rice asks: Can our observations of this machine’s perception allow us to reflect on human nature, perhaps even from a non-anthropocentric point of view? (Source: BEK.no)