Karyn Nakamura & Harvey Moon & Owen Trueblood & Brian Oakes

Boring Reality is an installation built around a microcosm of New York City trash mechanically animated within a transparent chamber. Inside, an artificial tornado along with animatronics and mechanical systems set various debris in constant motion.

Circling this chaos is the “Enhancer” - a custom-built machine, cobbled together from salvaged parts, that slowly scans the trash from three sides. Through a live camera-and-screen apparatus, it captures images of the debris and displays AI-generated reinterpretations in real time, transfiguring trash into flowers, jewelry, and various other stochastic approximations of beauty.

The constant drone of the trash cyclone along with live footage from within the chamber, is captured by half broken, legged toys that move through the miniature landscape as “on-the-ground reporters.”Their footage is projected live outside the space, while the captured sounds are sampled and manipulated by a musician, transforming mechanical noise into an evolving soundscape that further distorts the scene. An additional multi-camera contraption moves along one wall of the space, capturing the audience and projecting their image back into the microcosm, producing a hollow, recursive reflection of the real.

The work stages the absurdity of trusting artificial systems to enhance and optimize reality. A blind trust in technological vision promises clarity while distancing us from underlying mess. What remains of cognition when the tools we use to understand the world are designed to sanitize and enhance away its truths?

The title of the work comes from a LoRA model called Boring Reality, which Karyn used extensively in her past research on deepfake identification for its ability to generate duller, uglier images that would evade common visual heuristics for AI.

Boring Reality was developed in collaboration with Harvey Moon, Owen Trueblood, Brian Oakes, and Leo Martinez, with support from Zoo as Zoo, documentation by SHOWStudio, and presentation at Cafe Studio. Collaborating musicians included Solv and Kamran Sadeghi.