Autumn 2023
Artificial idiot: Puzzling answers to nonexistent questions
Jonathan Hoefler experiments with AI to create what he calls ‘Apocryphal Inventions’. By Marian Bantjes / Eye Editors [EXTRACT]
When Jonathan Hoefler started experimenting with Midjourney, he directed his AI prompts to generate a series of ‘Apocryphal Inventions’. These are cyberpunk confections of wood and enamelled metal that could be mechanical instruments, control room gauges or writing machines with intricate engravings and perversely unreadable type, their cracks occasionally infested with tiny creatures.
Hoefler states that he created this ‘aestheticised nonsense’ by subverting the system ‘to refine and intensify its most intriguing misunderstandings’ …
Top image. Early typewriter misfire by Wm. Tunnicliffe & Sons of Birmingham.
Marian Bantjes, graphic artist, writer, Bowen Island, Canada
Read the full version in Eye no. 105 vol. 27, 2023
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