Description

“Not THIS” is a conceptual and experiential artwork that engages both Artificial Intelligence and Baudrillardian theory to explore absence, exclusion, and the poetics of negation. A live camera feed captures the viewer and their surroundings, but the AI does not identify what is present; instead, it generates large typewriter-style text describing what is not detected, with phrases such as “Not a person. Not a tree. Not memory.” By refusing to recognize reality directly, the A.I. inverts its conventional role as an objective classifier, creating a tension between what is visible and what is acknowledged. The piece is based on Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra and hyperreality, in which signs and representations can replace or precede reality. Here, the A.I.’s negations produce a hyperreal commentary: the viewer exists in the video feed yet is rendered partially absent in the textual output. This inversion exposes the limitations of machine perception while turning A.I. into a poetic device, generating meaning through omission rather than factual identification.

Context

“Not THIS” extends René Magritte’s Ce N’est Pas Une Pipe into the age of Artificial Intelligence. Just as Magritte’s painting exposes the gap between representation and reality—reminding viewers that an image of a pipe is not a pipe—“Not This” reveals the limits of machine perception. The AI refuses to affirm what it sees, instead naming what is not present, echoing Magritte’s paradox of language and image. Both works question the authority of vision and truth, inviting viewers to confront the instability of meaning, and how representation, whether painted or algorithmic constructs, rather than captures, the real.

The combination of mirrored live video and ephemeral text creates a performative space where presence and absence coexist. By foregrounding what the A.I. cannot or will not detect, “Not This” invites viewers to reflect on the instability of perception, the authority of technology, and the imaginative possibilities that arise when AI is intentionally inverted. Absence becomes an aesthetic and philosophical site, blending human experience with algorithmic interpretation to produce a contemplative, uncanny, and critical engagement with both machine intelligence and mediated reality.

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