Fotogalerija

Matej Mihevc | @flat_gaze

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With the project @flat_gaze, new media artist of the younger generation Matej Mihevc explores the specificity of the current state of cultural production after post-internet. @flat_gaze raises questions about objectivity and meaning, innovation and authorship and the processes of production and dissemination in the arts and the broader cultural sphere, which are mutating at an accelerated rate with the advancement of neural networks and the increasing accessibility of artificial intelligence technologies.

@flat_gaze is embedded in the social media platform Instagram, today’s increasingly relevant art venue, which instead of an economy of value, aura and meaning is shaped by an economy of attention, reach and affect. The project @flat_gaze updates the contemporary figure of the creator of cultural content as a remixer, DJ, programmer or curator of content into a generative and automatised feedback web of consumption and production (of images).

The project includes the Instagram profile @flat_gaze, which follows specific profiles of individuals, art galleries and blogs related to digital, post-internet and contemporary arts that are posting photographic documentation of exhibitions, digital objects and their various intertwinements. The posts from these profiles are automatically aggregated and serve as a database for training the neural network StyleGAN2-ADA. The network learns unsupervised, and every day the automated process chooses random coordinates in the latent space, from which it generates the images that are posted on the @flat_gaze profile.

Thus, during their daily scrolling through Instagram, followers of the profile come across the algorithmically generated images which vividly recapitulate cultural patterns, trends and currents into outlines of objects, spaces and moods. In fact, they are two-dimensional visualisations of the sections of multidimensional categories into which the neural network quantifies cultural production. Thus, they present the human-visible fragments of an otherwise alien and incomprehensible algorithmic “view” of the cultural field.

In this, each image – even though as human followers we attempt to treat it as particular and meaningful because of the unusual semantic combinations – is special precisely in its genericness and (spatial and semantic) depth, which is only a surface effect. The automatised and hyperproductive loop does not communicate, criticise or reveal anything. It merely indifferently generates new affective possibilities for the human consumer and anticipates the algorithmically enriched creative processes of the future.

@flat_gaze is accompanied by Maks Valenčič's essay Open Secret.

With:

Matej Mihevc

In his artistic practice, Matej Mihevc explores the impact of new technologies on cultural production in a variety of ways. Recently, his main focus has been on different 3D modelling and animation software, although he is also interested in industrial processes and artificial materials, as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence. He is completing his postgraduate studies in Video and New Media at the Academy of Fine Art and Design (ALUO) of the University of Ljubljana. He has presented his work in several solo exhibitions: Deconstructed Club (2023, MoTA Lab), Polymer Ooze (2022, Dobra Vaga, in collaboration w. Vid Koprivšek), @flat_gaze (2021, osmo/za), Cambrian Interfaces (2021, Media Nox, in collaboration w. Farah Sara Kurnik). In the past, he has participated in several design projects, and for the past seven years, he has hosted the Modem radio show on Radio Študent, where he explores underground internet music.

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