Inframunk Is Breathing by GMUNK
The genesis chapter of the digital artwork “Inframunk Is Breathing” is centred around the idea that the breath of life can trigger a cellular-level transformation. The artwork features a digital valve that releases a respiratory bloom, resulting in a dance of psychedelic botany.
The artwork's rhythm and pace replicate the gradual awakening of the eye and neural pathways, allowing for true discovery and challenging the viewer to question what meets the eye. By allowing the tree's non-ordinary life and image to evolve, the viewer's understanding of it expands, leading to a metamorphosis that reveals its truest definition.
To achieve this heightened awareness, the artwork incorporates respiration, high-level machine learning, psychedelia, and photographic exposure to an invisible light spectrum. The intention is to peel back layers of diffusion and blockages, invoking a guided meditation crafted through a learning machine paired with the organic invocation of the spirit of nature.
“A metamorphosis is at hand that does not distort or deform, but reveals the truest definition. This truth is only detectable in a state of heightened awareness – here achieved through respiration, high-level machine learning, psychedelia, and photographic exposure to an invisible light spectrum.
The intention is to peel back layers of diffusion and blockages, to invoke a guided meditation of sorts that is crafted through a learning machine paired with the intuitive, organic invocation of the spirit of nature.
To the machine, the tree is a conglomerate of pixels. To the human eye it is comprised of cells, even more so, to the naked eye it has leaves, branches, a trunk, bark. Both systems, the machine learning and the human viewer, are initiated into an altered state in which the tree begins to breathe and grow.”
Both machine learning and human viewers experience an altered state in which the tree begins to breathe and grow. The journey of microcellular breathing causes the audience's vision to be repeated, patterned, alive, dismantled, and reformed, revealing the beauty of the artwork. Machine learning is given its own equivalent of a psychedelic dose in the form of prompts and embeddings, leading to the subdivision of the pixels and the tree's genetic and photographic makeup, resulting in a digital organism.
The intent and techniques used in the artwork are deliberate, but the outcome is mostly unknown. Transformation, mutation, and change, on a digital micro cellular plane, and a soulful one, must be allowed to surprise and expand. The artwork's First Breath becomes the trigger to unveil what lies beyond and challenges the biological status quo, resulting in a euphoric, transcendent, and elemental experience.
