All that we consider living around us is partly the result of expressing the organic encoding of information in DNA form. ‘Self-contained 003’ takes inspiration from the phenomena of encoding & decoding, a process rife with mutations. Coupled with the evolutionary nature of the crossbreeding and random changes, this mirrors some of the memetic aspects of our digital spaces wherein images are often combined, edited, degraded or re-contextualized.
In this piece, a target image becomes the subject of an iterative crossbreeding of random samples of strings from other compressed images, leading to a mutative evolution. Akin to grafting two plants together here images from a dataset are randomly spliced into the image “genome”. Decoding regenerates the image to a more recognisable form which is then aided by neural networks trained on the same dataset to further return colour and detail.
It is this iterative, simultaneous process of compression-decompression that the work depicts. Which, as around us, occurs in shared simultaneity. Just as our cells divide, mutate and grow, so do the contents of our shared digital spaces as we remix, are remixed, hyped, and made obsolete.
