mid-march / I BECAME BOMBARDED WITH MESSAGES. QUARANTINED, THIS WAS THE ONLY WAY TO CROSS A DISTANCE. ALL FEELING WAS COMING IN VIA DIGITAL MESSAGES AND I HATED THEM. IN PROPER ISOLATION FORM, I OFTEN NEVER REPLIED, OR EVER EVEN READ THEM. MESSAGES IMPLY A CONTEXT OF CORRESPONDENCE AND RELATIONSHIP. I WANTED TO BASTARDIZE THE TEXT MESSAGE. IS IT STILL A MESSAGE WITHOUT A RESPONSE; IS IT THEN LIKE A PROBE, OR A PROMPT, OR JUST AN UNTIED PIECE OF WRITING? THE FEELING HELD WITHIN THE SENT WORDS——WHERE DOES IT GO THEN? IS HOLDING THAT FEELING THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE RECIPIENT? ALSO, COULD I PLACE THIS BURDEN OF FEELING, OF LANGUAGE, ELSEWHERE?
unknown person for the weekend
is a text-based art project. each piece is a conversation: a message (first image) and its reply (second image). each message is a real text message sent during quarantine, sourced mainly from the digital lives of people i know on the internet (though a message or two may be pulled from my own phone). each reply is written by a text generation a(p)i, which is backed mainly by a large-scale unsupervised transformer-based language model based on the gpt-2 model by open-ai, created by connor leahy and accessed through deep-ai.
who am i…
what is this all for…
i’m layla! you can message me
laylaelqutami@gmail.com
this project has been borne of my rising anxiety surrounding:
1) digital communication conventions
2) the vastness of the internet
3) the innate voyeurism of social existence
unknown person for the weekend 