Figures of History and the Grounds of Intelligence

What happens when an image leaves a state archive and enters the feedback loops of an artificial neural network? Inspired by an encounter that the artist had at the Google Cultural Institute with an image originating from the National Gallery Singapore, Figures of History and the Grounds of Intelligence travels back in time to probe the intersecting histories of state planning, global networks and cybernetics that span from the Cold War to the ongoing boom in generative artificial intelligence. Looking into how different historical figurations have come to make up the grounds of “intelligence” that underpin today’s generative text-to-image models, the narrative focuses on what it means for these models to “learn” from history without actually understanding it in order to generate ever-changing distributions of noise. At stake here is the future of representation itself—a future where images appear to have no history to speak of.