AI/VR: situated animation in the Library of Babel

Abstract

If cinema represents the 'most replete and consuming instance of an interface for dreaming', what more can we expect of virtual technologies and Artificial Intelligence, or indeed, of computation in general, to create animated works that surpass our longstanding, heterogeneous, heritage of time-based visual media? The promise of VR and AI is arguably that of an ontological and ethical shift, one that takes us closer to a posthuman animation. Through a practice-based research process the author reports on the ways in which a VR/AI work, 'Return to the Library of Babel', deploys procedural animation and emergent spaces, engendering a dynamic, animated realm, one of situated, emergent, subjects and objects, within what Sara Ahmed frames as a political economy of, and, one might add a logic, of 'disorientation'. The paper was first presented at the 1st ANIVAE workshop on Animation in Virtual and Augmented Environments, 19 March 2018, Reutlingen, Germany.