TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Reflections Through the Pre-Individual Mirror is an artwork presentation and performance by transdisciplinary artist Dann Disciglio. For the work, the artist will utilize real-time AI style transfer protocols (RAVE, streamDiffusion) trained on his personal data and reverse image search technology to exhibit a collaborative performance with his exteriorized, pre-individual self. The two performers, Disciglio and his AI alternate will together, through broken conversation, shared movements, affection, and self sabotage, produce an event which transmits to the audience, the brutality of self. 

This performance will seek to convey, through sensation, the raw, pre-conceptual power that latent representations of self - as appearance, as voice, as energy - have in challenging the way we perceive ourselves and how we are perceived by others. Unlike traditional posthuman critiques of self, these works are motivated by a belief that generative AI has introduced new power structures of over-stratification that require new aesthetic strategies and methods for decoding the virtual. This performance will also be supplemented with text reflections (possibly a manifesto) that will outline a framework for negotiating these shifts. This text will explore concepts relating to the aesthetics of training an AI model, virtual/virtuality, stratification, affect, memory, humanism/posthumanism.