When Klaus Fischer of Kunstverein Freunde aktueller Kunst Zwickau invited me to artistically work on words or lines from Kurt Tucholsky’s poem “Absage” for the exhibition “Demokratie. Wählen! Nicht schiessen!” I was in the process of rendering the section “The Basic Rights” (Articles 1 to 19) of the German Basic Law using AI. A similar approach naturally suggested itself.
For the Basic Rights series, I had developed the following procedure (so to speak, my artistic algorithm): First, I rendered the corresponding text source into images article by article, then paragraph by paragraph, and finally sentence by sentence using several different image-generating AIs, and observed how the various AIs handled the text fragments.
AI Models acquire visual knowledge by being trained on large image databases with text descriptions. Sources for such databases include Wikipedia, the Common Crawl, a dataset of over five billion word-image pairs from the publicly accessible web, as well as proprietary databases.
My thesis is that these AIs are trained based on our own visual perceptions as we publish them and therefore also reproduce our worldviews and prejudices.
The text input for image-generating AI is called a prompt. It has become the quasi standard for an AI to output a quartet of different images per rendering task. The trained basic visual understanding of an AI, which is the part that can translate a concept into an image, is called a model.
I use three or more different AI models, each trained on different datasets, to compare the results. Three of them (Dreamstudio, DALL-E, and Ideogram) are commercial, proprietary, and used online, but they also reserve the right to censor unwelcome content. The other two models are variants of the freely accessible Stable Diffusion model, which can be installed locally.
As a prompt, I exclusively use the original text of the source without descriptive adjustments, which are normally used to specify the task (see the left side for a typically otherwise common prompt).
As the next step, I select one from the several quartets generated per prompt. Since the entire process was exploratory and I had no specific guidelines or goals regarding the resulting images, I rendered the entire poem as images multiple times.
Absage
Noch einmal? Ich dächte, wir hätten jetzt Frieden?
Ueber Gesetze wird friedlich entschieden …
Ein Straßensturm auf ein Parlament
ist kein Argument.
Diese Matrosen sind keine Matrosen.
Dazwischen Schwärme von Arbeitslosen.
Kämpfer. Banausen. Neugierige. Mob.
Nun aber stop –!
Das Parlament ist ein Spiegel des Landes.
Da sitzen Vertreter jeden Standes.
Will euch die Politik verdrießen –:
Wählen! Nicht schießen!
Eine Gasse der Freiheit – nicht eine Gosse!
Rückt ab von jenem Lärmmachertrosse!
Wir brauchen Ruhezeit. So wird das nie
eine Demokratie –!
Autor: Kurt Tucholsky unter dem Pseudonym Theobald Tiger
Titel: Absage
aus: Ulk Jahrgang 49, Nummer 4, Seite 14
Erscheinungsdatum: 23. Januar 1920
Verlag: Rudolf Mosse
Erscheinungsort: Berlin
I printed a brochure with about 40 of the outputs (80 pages). Email me if you would like to order one.
Some of the output
The series now consists of 76 quartets and some singles. Each quartet is an edition of 4, printed in 60 cm x 60 cm on Hahnemühle PhotoRag. Below are some examples. Prompt and AI model used are mentioned in the caption.
