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Jeanyoon Choi (b.1999) is a Computational Artist researching in interconnectivity and complexity through Multi-Device Web Artworks.

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jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cat creating-monochrome-digital-paintings-out-of-chatgpt

Creating Monochrome Digital Paintings out of ChatGPT

2024-03-23

An interactive monochrome made from language: layers upon layers of text generated by ChatGPT or another language model.

I am thinking of Dansaekhwa, of repetition and materiality, and of abstraction pushed towards its limit. Language appears to occupy the opposite position. We ordinarily use it to describe. Poetry can make language abstract, but that is far from its everyday use—and from much of the descriptive, repetitive writing produced by ChatGPT. My question is what happens when that language is treated as material.

What happens when descriptive, computational or supposedly intelligible outputs are repeated and accumulated on a massive scale? I keep returning to ΣPart ≠ Whole. Accumulation can change the character of its parts. It is a qualitative transformation, not simply an increase in quantity.

This is also the concern of 『≠』. Individual algorithmic outputs may appear logical and interpretable, yet their combination produces something chaotic and difficult to read. The apparent equality of each part does not guarantee an intelligible whole.

Could the same transformation produce a monochrome? I imagine returning to some of the visual experiments of Laboratory Occupied. Text begins with meaning, but as it accumulates, it becomes illegible. It is consumed as material. ChatGPT itself becomes a source of material rather than a voice we must understand. Does an infinite accumulation of meaning become an absence of meaning?

One possible arrangement uses a keyboard as the input and six screens as outputs. A participant enters a keyword; language models generate text across the screens. The context of those texts remains to be decided. As interaction intensifies, their accumulation accelerates until overlapping layers fill the screens and individual words can no longer be read.

Glenn Ligon and Jenny Holzer are relevant references, although the disappearance of meaning is not necessarily their purpose.

At first, the participant may cling to what the words mean. Later, could the interaction release them from that demand? Could they affirm the signifier—the letters, the marks, the equivalent of ink—rather than continually searching for the signified? They would enter a larger system produced by language without needing to decode every sentence.

This is one possible meaning of immersion for me. The movement from a blank screen to an accelerating monochrome matters as much as the final surface. Interaction carries the participant from meaning to its dissolution, from language to colour, from description to abstraction. The resulting surface continues to change, even when it is no longer clear exactly where a change has occurred.

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