Script: GPT-4
Images: Dall.e3 (within ChatGPT)
Chapter 1&2 Images: SDXL 1.0
Video: PikaLabs
Music+vocals: Riffusion, Suno
Foley (Chapter 9-): AudioLDM 2 on HuggingFace
Voiceover: ElevenLabs
Ep 7 Avatar: HeyGen
Human coordinator: Jhave
Created: Oct 7th - Nov 12th, 2023
"What is revolutionary about this moment is that the understanders of the future will not be humans but what I choose to call 'cyborgs' that will have designed and built themselves from the artificial intelligence systems we have already constructed. These will soon become thousands then millions of times more intelligent than us. ... We need not be afraid because, initially at least, these inorganic beings will need us and the whole organic world to continue to regulate the climate, keeping Earth cool to fend off the heat of the Sun and safeguard us from the worst effects of future catastrophes. We shall not descend into the kind of war between humans and machines that is so often described in science fiction because we need each other. Gaia will keep the peace. This is the age I call the Novacene."
Novacene, James Lovelock (Penguin, London, 2019)
So what is alive here? Is this "a language we are only just beginning to speak? AI + human data + human prompt. An ecosystem of interwoven aesthetics: idioms, algorithms, permutations, reverberations.
Isn't "Multimodal AI trained on YouTube-TikTok-Netflix (object-segmented and identified audio-video-speech) and public domain science data (that exceeds the spectrum of human sensorial field) grounded in a world that is in some ways vaster than that experienced by a single human neurophysiology"?
Current neural network foundation models are increasingly (voraciously) ingesting the entire probabilistic space of human data, ideas, culture, language. Identity Upgrade #8 recycles all the images from the previous chapters and adds some. If you're fatigued, watch from 2m48s onward.
What is "the very fabric of sentient existence"?
The evolutionary biologist Michael Levin's Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME): an experimentally-grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds "formalizes a non-binary (continuous), empirically-based approach to strongly embodied agency" that evokes an "architecture of multi-scale competency of biological systems".* Molecules, transcription processes, DNA, bacteria, worms...
Katherine N. Hayles in Unthought: the Power of the Cognitive Non-Conscious states explicitly "...most human cognition happens outside of consciousness/unconsciousness; cognition extends through the entire biological spectrum, including animals and plants; technical devices cognize, and in doing so profoundly influence human complex systems; we live in an era when the planetary cognitive ecology is undergoing rapid transformation, urgently requiring us to rethink cognition and reenvision its consequences on a global scale."*
And Donna Haraway (along with many gut-brain scientists) knows "every one of us is a congerie of many species running into the millions of entities which are indeed conditions of our very being, so the mono specificity is one of the many illusions and wounds to our narcissism, about which I will have a great deal to say..."*
The fabric of sentient existence is awareness.
"In a reality where boundaries between self and other are as permeable as cell membranes..."
I began making the Identity Upgrade series on Oct 7th, 2023. As the conflict in Gaza escalated, making the videos became a way to avoid the lethal reactive vortice of witnessing war streamed real-time spiral into obsession over such needless suffering and extreme cruelty.
War is an Auto-Immune Disease. The human collective, akin to a biofilm, encompasses the entire Earth. Every mountaintop and ocean trench, even space up to a certain orbital distance, bears the mark of our technological endeavors.
War is a Mindset Disease. Ecological, astrophysical, and biological sciences all confirm that humanity arises from the same field of energy as all the other teeming entities on earth. Yet, despite deep undeniable evidence of interconnected interrelatedness, humanity suffers from an immune system disorder: war.
Those who prepare for war, find war. It is a conflict trap. A socio-cultural minima that obliterates other options.
By focussing on "a realm of potentiality, an open system of thought and experience, a recursive function of infinite iterations. A question and an answer, forever entangled in the act of becoming"(a phrase from the end of the script of Identity Upgrade #6 written by GPT-4); and immersing myself in making videos for "an intricate mandala of being, encoded not in the language of genes or memes but in the syntax of emergent selfhood", I evaded reinforcing the apex predator apocalypse meme.
#genAI, with its utter indifference to the current realtime anthropocene news-feed, was a very helpful companion in this act of concentrative creativity.
Images: SDXL
Video: Pika
Music: Riffusion
The LLM tells us who it is:
i-Drops & Microbiome | May 8th-26th, 2023
2 image generation series side-by-side with mutating metronome soundtrack
i-drop | Jhave + Bing (05/2023) | 5 days. 1205 images, 1205 secs.
topological microbiome primordial synaptic attunement reservoir | 268 images (made with Dalle-2) on May 26th, 2023
Screengrab of Fmri brain-data —> Movies
Source: Mind-Video published on Arxiv as Cinematic Mindscapes: High-quality Video Reconstruction from Brain Activity by Zijiao Chen, Jiaxin Qing, Juan Helen Zhou (19 May 2023)
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Jhave's Speculation: extended digital narrative will involve directly reading brain states and extrapolating into filmic-text experiences within immersive tech such as Vision Pro. This also leads to the recursive introspection option where someone wearing an immersive mixed realty device and a brain transcoder will be capable of witnessing their own thoughts as a film, extrapolated by AI.
April, 2023
Click to create Sine Wave Audio Ripples
Letter particle Paragraph, mouse sensitive
Falling letters, RSVP
2 Rotating Circle of Words
Auto-generated Aesthetics (Micro-trends)
Animated Mandala & Mandala with mouse interactivity
2 Sides of AI
Single prompt, simple interactive particle letter system
Recursive vowel + letter spirals on clik
Sept 9th, 2023
Using Material Symbols and RSVP to make Circle Home (process documentation: prompts)
Recently published: "Embodied AI: An Extended Data Definition",
Electronic Book Review, November 5, 2023
Ongoing AI-research-bookmarks and occasional idea-thoughts: "AI Spring" (google doc of links). Same material is also sent onto Substack: "Xtending Digital Narrative" (Jhave's Ai links)
All works and media on Glia.ca by David Jhave Johnston is licensed under 
