Aleksi Halttunen

An agreeable kind of horror 2024 Copper, silicon, plastic, glass     In a speech following a screening of his 1992 documentary “Lessons of Darkness” Werner Herzog describes truth in an attempt to define it in a world increasingly filled with false, artificial images. His first definition is that of “an accountant’s truth”, the empirically or logically verifiable physical truth. Mathematical theorems and natural phenomena are true in the sense that they can be proven or experienced to be true. Beyond such truths, eluding definition, lies a different truth, which Herzog calls ‘ecstatic’ truth. This is a 'poetic' truth accessible only through fabrication, imagination and stylisation. In ecstatic truths, the link between aesthetic experience and physical truth becomes blurred and the artificial, false image becomes the way through which it can be experienced. Since these definitions, with the adoption of generative neural networks, the speed at which artificial imagery is generated has increased drastically. Hito Steyerl describes in her essay “Mean Images” how generated images are “statistical renderings” referencing probabilities, rather than real objects or truths. She describes these renderings as onboarding tools for the adoption of technologies that have real physical consequences including the automatisation of labour, human rights violations and unsustainable resource consumption. Although false in its representation of reality, artificial imagery has quickly circled back to representing abstracted versions of physical truths. In this work a computer and a 1.3” screen are used to output statistical renderings of natural phenomena. It is part of an inquiry into how the artificial image relates to truth, digital materiality and the finitude of the pixelated image. https://aleksi.xyz/