James Irwin is an artist and PhD researcher at the Contemporary Art Research Centre, Kingston. He works with web technologies, AI systems and digital sound and image to investigate the notion of a vital life force inherent within digital media.

By creating cognitive assemblages – made from a combination of networked digital hardware, software and human wetware – his work builds from new materialist ideas around recentering the human, undoing our role as autonomous individuals and pointing to the ways in which the production of subjectivity is offset to forces outside of our bodies; the posthuman is biological, but also networked and dispersed through machines.

His talk at Kingston will be based around the AI text generating systems (a fine tuned GPT-3 model) and images housed at surfacecollider.net (ongoing). The work bypasses photographic modes of representation to construct spaces within Contemporary Art where the viewer is brought together with the synthetic languages of machines. Across the pages of the surfacecollider website new writings and images are triggered by user interaction, recasting the visitor as an active agent in the production of the work alongside hardware and software systems, the artist, and previous visitors who have also contributed to the chain.