Spectacle by Sterling Crispin

Spectacle is a reinterpretation of Guy Debord’s 1967 book of critical theory “The Society of the Spectacle”, using OpenAI’s GPT3 neural network to simplify the first ten theses into plain english, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 to convert these aphorisms into images. The book is a critique of modern life which argues that we have been alienated from ourselves, each other, and reality itself by the cultural, economic and political conditions of society, which he calls the spectacle. Spectacle presents this philosophical theory through tweet-sized writing and generative imagery. The images both seem to illustrate the concepts described, yet also fail to grasp the more philosophical aspects of the text. This results in a chaotic cross section of imagery excavated from the latent space of the neural network and the society that it was trained on. This semi-random and semi-autonomously produced series of artworks is not just a collection of images, but rather a way of seeing the world.