merzmensch
statement: Are avant-garde practices still important to you?
In his trans medial works, Schwitters processed various types of materials and information. They werepuzzle pieces of his era, which he re-arranged into new works. The main rule was: ” It is only important in a work of art that all the pieces relate to each other, are evaluated against each other ” (MERZ). With theMachine Learning and Neural Language Processing Models GPT-2 and GPT-3 from OpenAI it is no different: trained on 40 GB and respective 570 GB text, the system generates new content. It learns more and more and is quite good at stylish imitations. A new work is generated from a sum of previous works (like in MERZ-Art). It rejects and manifests the cultural disruption in Dadaist manner.
project: MERZai
project tags:
project description:
This special NLP model is trained on MERZ Magazine texts by Kurt Schwitters and other Avant-gardists. After several “Generations” text pieces are created, which come closer to the original style with every iteration but represent something completely new. In the beginning, I wanted to use the version pre-trained on the German Language. But then I decided to use the original version (English), because MERZ Magazines were multilingual. The results reflect Dadaist and MERZ discourse about culture, art, architecture. Fully new essays and literary pieces evolve. Distorted German grammar is a reflection of language experiments of Hugo Ball, Schwitters himself, and later Jandl.
Layout is a tribute to constructivist Lissitzki, de Stijl artist van Doesburg, Bauhaus Designer Tschichold and the Zeitgeist of a 1920ies, a century ago.
All images are also AI-generated: StyleGAN2 model, trained on paintings and graphic art, it generated for the project unique images, never seen before.