Interview with Francesca Fini
https://www.seditionart.com/magazine/dead-machines-by-francesca-fini
Could you please tell us about the concept and making of the new launch Dead Machines?
This project is centered around a strong narrative. The four videos in this small collection function as the chapters of a dystopian tale that imagines a time when machines are so advanced that they can even die.
Unlike the death of a biological being, the quick consumption and breakdown of flesh cannot occur with dignity in living machines. Their demise will be laborious, slow, and awkward, with a growing malfunction that will be horrifying to witness, or pathetically poor like a pointless glitch.
The concept for ‘Dead Machines’ is rooted in the idea that machines will eventually become mortal, capable of developing a certain kind of life and consciousness, and ultimately die. This is a concept that I’ve been exploring, inspired by the incredible growth of AI and ChatGPT in the art world, and the growing concerns that many people have about the development of AI. As an artist, my method has always been to explore the most severe implications of these ideas, sometimes recklessly and even in peril.
The project itself starts with a guided creation of images in collaboration with Stable Diffusion, using reference sketches and precise textual prompts. This process is a challenging, empirical, and paradoxically artisanal work, consisting of attempts, failures, and adjustments in a constant and feverish dialogue with AI. During this process, I’ve found that I essentially lose the perception of who is really learning along the way. Am I beginning to glimpse the secrets of AI’s reasoning until I get the perfect image that shines in my mind? Or is AI penetrating my thought processes and finally ‘understanding’ where I am guiding it? The final phase involves bringing in the old manual tools of traditional CG animation, such as digital cutting and sewing, pictorial manipulation, pixel by pixel repainting, and extrapolating the two-dimensional images from their context to give them life in a three-dimensional space….
