A hybrid AI system is trained on text from colonial handbooks of Cyprus and employing a custom image dataset to generate new colonial ‘gazes’ of Cyprus upon demand. Output text and imagery is used in a number of physical and digital artefacts and events: a physical book comprising AI-generated text and imagery, smartphone applications for iPhone and Android, and a multimedia installation. The project is part of a wider artistic project thematic concerned with decolonial re-interpretations of the island’s history. The endeavour employs an AttnGAN text-to-image generation model and a RNN text generator. The latter is trained on text from colonial handbooks of Cyprus, originally published when Cyprus was still part of the British Empire and reflecting an overly orientalist gaze of the (then) newly annexed British colony. Cyprus is presented therein as a degenerate country whose people are in urgent need of salvation. Trained on such a corpus, the model may then generate new colonial descriptions of Cyprus. These then become the input of a GAN-driven text-to-image pipeline. This subsystem relies on a bespoke dataset that is meant to reflect the local reality since, not surprisingly, the readily available image databases largely fail to account for Eastern Mediterranean landscapes/culture (they generally produce images that are more reminiscent of the Western cities that host the big tech companies that distribute them).

Tactics against Antiquity probes the making and unmaking of intra-personal and extra-personal place-hood, history, and memory. Inspired by the ancient practice of ‘peripatos’ – both as a political act and as a strategy for epistemic inquiry – the artist leads a walk through the ruins of ancient Messene, presenting the audience with audio documents of, and with creative responses to, his own personal (un)makings at play. Tactics against Antiquity draw on found audio, folk traditions, abstract sound synthesis, dark ecology, politicised narratives, transgressive audioscape juxtapositions, tactical silence, speculative ethnography, and real time exploration of various acoustic, electromagnetic, and geophysical phenomena in-situ, in this way intending to bring forth a post-historical and meta-phenomenological perspective of the ‘contemporary’ ancient Messene.