*THIS WORK HAS BEEN CENSORED BY MOVEMENT RADIO WHICH IS AN ONASSIS FOUNDATION KOUTSAVAKI*

The Life & Times of Aphrodite, Queen of Beauty

WHAT IS THE STORY
In ‘The Life & Times of Aphrodite, Queen of Beauty’ we invoked the text-generating capabilities of contemporary AI to reflect on questions of beauty, art and materiality through a series of mythological genealogies, (anti-)humanist reflections and archetypal story-telling. The algorithm used to produce the text relies on a deep learning model called a recurrent neural network (RNN). This model is trained on a large corpus of text, and can generate new text that is similar to the training data - in this case we used Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 aka GTP-3 which is trained on a vast amount of online conversations and millions of digitized books. The model is capable of learning the long-term dependencies in the text, and can generate coherent and realistic outputs. The language model we used is capable of generating long-form text with the assistance of a few user-inputed prompts. Our prompts of 10-15 words set the overall intention of the text, and the algorithm generated the different chapters based on them. We didn’t edit or intervene in any shape or form with the final output. 

In order to transcribe the text into sound we used a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). With a GAN, you have two neural networks: a generator and a discriminator. The generator tries to create fake audio samples that sound realistic, while the discriminator tries to distinguish between real and fake samples. The two networks compete with each other, and as they do, the generator gets better and better at creating fake audio samples. Other audio inputs for this piece also included stock music, T-T-S (Ivy, child), special FX awards, field recordings, 8-bit music, happy hardcore, a song by Dana International, and YouTube extracts.

The resulting audioplay follows goddess Aphrodite through the millennia of her existence providing a philosophical account of the history of aesthetics. While story-driven and highly entertaining the work also explores questions around the nature of art, the concepts in art, and the experience of art. In our story, Aphrodite the goddess of love and beauty experiences multiple existential crises as historical definitions of both love and beauty shift and often collapse over time. In her attempt to keep up with times Aphrodite has to re-configure her subjectivity and belief systems, a process of evolutionary adaptations that mirrors the function of artificial intelligence. Both AI and our Aphrodite crave for a totalising comprehension of reality but always fails as we live in a world of absurdity and finitude. Our training data sets are as flawed as the subjects producing them; creativity (and even our understanding of beauty) spring out of unconscious processes in ways that can only be affectively effective when they ambush us. With this work we aspire to understand what the collective unconscious of the algorithmic abyss can teach us about the impossibility (and therefore freedom) of desire.

Part 1: The Beginning; The School of Wild Aesthetics

Part 2: Industrial Revolution & the Creation of Beauty 2.0

Part 3: Pikachu, the Beloved Slave

Part 4: The Plight of the Perverts

Part 5: Lena Kitsopoulou’s Heart

Part 6: Crime & Punishment; The Birth of the House of Love & Beauty

Part 7: Bio-Hacking Aristotle

Part 8: Aphrodite X: the Famous Widow

Part 9: Eternal Diva

The Life & Times Of Aphrodite, Queen Of Beauty

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