Memory of everywhere
Mario Guzman
Memory of everywhere is a textual artificial organism that performs a reading and writing exercise using video input from around the globe and a generative language model trained on 19th-century travel literature. The work focuses on the notion of travel, journey, discovery, and cognition. The work arises from a need to comprehend a series of chaotic experiences while traveling to more than 45 countries and 1,723 flight hours with a social robot. To make sense of the speed and heterogeneity of these episodes, I trained a writing system to explain to me what it thought it was happening. The system articulates two structures: a convolutional neural network using mobile vision and a long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture of recurrent neural network (RNN).
The work is also an experiment around an endless writing action that tries to understand a world constituted by limited objects and perceptions, perhaps a reflection of our own cognitive operations.
About the Artist
Mario Guzman is a Mexican researcher, experimental writer, and new media artist based in Argentina / Hong Kong. He has an MA in Literature and a Master in Technology and Aesthetics of Electronic.
In his thesis: "Interfaces and writing modes at the intersection between digital literature and electronic arts", he proposes to merge writing with sound, electromagnetic phenomenons, web development, electronic art, algorithmic literature, and robotics.
Interested in the border between the illegible, the non-linear, and the unstable, he works with the dynamics of disappearing, and continuously looping elements. For him, writing is a performative process that unfolds during performative events and meaningful scenarios in which humans and machines participate together in the creation and negotiation of meaning as an interactive experience.
His process aims to bring code studies, storytelling, and culture together by exploring the communication between human and non-human agents, robot-human interaction, and different ways to encode perception and narrative through machines and Artificial Intelligence.
His work has been exhibited in México, Panamá, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, France, USA, Hong Kong, and Germany. Highlights include Itaú Digital Story Award, XIX International Biennial of Visual Arts in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Biennial of Young Art in Buenos Aires, Full-dome Understanding Visual Music residency, and the 105th Installations and Media Arts National Hall.
Currently, he works at Hanson Robotics traveling the world with Sophia the Robot, while designing an artificial neural network narrator based on different kinds of literary works.
www.mario-guzman.com
IG:@marioguzzzman