“Ceci n’est pas un chat” (This is not a cat) – with this contemporary parody of the well-known statement by surrealist painter René Magritte, Maria Korporal explores the identity of AI chatbots, playing with the changing meanings of the word “chat” in French and English. Is a chat a cat?
On a wooden laptop with chalkboards, an entertaining dialogue takes place through chalk animation, where the artist alternates between asking questions in French and English to lure a chatbot into giving an explanation of its identity. The conclusion: “An unreal cat in a virtual chat” is meaningful for the scene of the virtual reality film – a surreal 360° landscape with undefinable objects and structures, and some notably large cats, all in angular low-poly style. The artist generated this landscape using artificial intelligence and then intervened with human touches, ranging from analogue to digital.
In addition to the animated wooden laptop mentioned earlier, there is a rotating spherical head of a retro electric typewriter spreading characters across the ground, occasionally forming concepts. Numerous animated pastel drawings with signs and symbols are scattered like moving graffiti over the structures in the landscape. A rotating sphere – or is it a black hole? – reveals a whirlwind of characters and texts, sometimes experiencing a short circuit.
An important element is formed by the dialogues between the chat-cats, which appear as running text on a few walls. The artist opened two ChatGPT browser windows and copied the questions and answers from one chatbot to the other and vice versa. In this way, two chatbots talk with each other. The result is stunning: dialogues about favorite books, interests and wishes emerge without human intervention. This makes us wonder: Do chatbots really have an independent identity?
See also the website https://www.mariakorporal.com/questioning-qats/
The installation will be shown in the exhibition Wahrheit Wirklichkeit Realität, February 23 – March 10, 2024 at Galerie VBK Berlin.
Magritte's pipe is one of my favourite all-time works of art, for its existential exploration of the meaning of art and reality itself. So Maria, your cats' chats certainly has me intrigued! Sadly I don't have any VR viewing tech, but I'm wondering if there a version that's on YouTube (or other platform) because I know it's possible to view 360° videos there with that ability to 'look around' as you go?
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