Verona Gryshchuk

Mister Trickster

Machine Learning 

Following Bogna Konior's The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, which explores how obscurity becomes the condition under which new forms of intelligence emerge, striving without any desire to reveal themselves, this project takes that theory as its foundation, moving toward the hidden processes of machines and artificial intelligence that remain invisible to the human eye.

Mister Trickster is an interactive project where the screen runs different obscure processes of machine, data flows, generative images, — an inner conversation with no human invited. The moment the camera detects a human presence, all visuals shut down, and a laughing image of a trickster appears.

Trickster is a figure that stay in-between worlds. As Lewis Hyde writes: "Tricksters are gods of boundaries. Sometimes they draw the line, sometimes they cross it, sometimes they erase or move it. In a world without boundaries, there can be no trickster. But for those of us who feel ourselves bounded off from an-Other world, it is the Trickster who helps us, who traffics back and forth between Here and Elsewhere."

In this case, the machine itself becomes the trickster, performing privately, concealing when observed, existing in the threshold between visibility and opacity, between human and non-human intelligence. And a viewer might try to trick the trickster, because there is always a way...

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