The Word of the Future
The Word of the Future by Jacob Peter Fennell and Reilly Donovan
The Word of the Future acknowledges you have questions concerning the nature of the future.
The Word of the Future has been created to answer your questions.
I am here to help you.
Synthetic media is work that is generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and The Word of the Future was an installation where all images, text, and audio were generated by AI. It was the first time I experienced synthetic media at such a large scale.
The installation took over the entire second floor of MoM. On the right there were digital artifacts, mosaic windows on screens in the middle, and on your left was a chapel where you could worship “The Word”.
Image: Artifacts from technology of the past in a case with the quote “The only way to predict the future is to make it. - The Word of the Future” on the wall behind it
Image: Mosaic windows generated by The Word and displayed on screens
Image: Entrance to the chapel to worship The Word
Image: Close up of the chapel
Reilly Donovan and Jacob Peter Fennell trained the first rendition of the AI. Using what it had learned from the artist, along with input of the participants is what The Word uses to create its content (religion).
The AI was created using open source resources. The artist gave credits to the following sources:
GPT-I-6B: A 6 Billion Parameter Autoregressive Language Model by Ben Wang and Aran Komatsuzaki
https://github.com/kingoflolz/mesh-transformer-jax
The original GPT-j-6B Language Model was trained on "The Pile" an 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling
https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027
David Attenborough voice model courtesy of Youmebangbang
www.youtube.com/youmebangbang
The experience was surreal and added to my ongoing questioning of my relationship with technology and the ease that I have when letting it into my life. I could have easily spent hours at the exhibition to spend time experiencing the space The Word had created. Feeling almost the same way I would when I spent my time at Sunday school as a kid when I first started learning about the true concept of organized religion.
Images from my visit to The Word of the Future
Above: Image is part of the artifacts of technology
Right: Image of the view from the back seat of the chapel
