We live in an age of Simulacra, where versions of ourselves are created, multiplied, stored, transformed and shared, often without our knowledge or consent. We fear losing our humanness, individually and as a species, not knowing whether the thing we encounter is real or merely a symbol of what was once real.

 

In much the same way that Artificial Intelligence is the amalgamation of many peoples’ bodies, knowledge, thoughts and creativity, Simulacra is an amalgamation between resident researcher Monica Lim, the Grainger Museum and students from the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, VCA Dance and the School of Computing and Information Systems. We thought deeply about AI in the creative arts and more broadly in society, speculating about its promise of freedom to reach new artistic frontiers, in contrast to the risk of accelerating a monoculture in a feedback cycle of data scraping, copying and regenerating.

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We found a strange companionship with Percy and Ella Grainger’s mannequins, simulacras that served both as a metaphor for AI and as a repository for our anxieties and exhilaration about new possibilities. Grainger’s legacy of retranslating folk songs and other composer’s works, and producing multiple versions of his own work drew parallels to technology being used to ‘preserve and embalm’ our everyday life, then producing multiple created selves in our social media feed and big data models.