fudge.studio / DIGITAL BOÎTE-EN-VALISE / NIGHT DRIVING / AI OPERATIONS · POST-2022
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NIGHT DRIVING — SUB-ENTRY
Model Commands — Post-2022
Model Commands — Post-2022
Machine learning and generative AI deployed not as image-production tools but as conceptual instruments of intervention, co-authorship, rewriting, and productive failure, applied to files that have been stored in Hard Drives alongside their author's regrets.
XOR TERRITORY · CO-AUTHORSHIP · REWRITE · INTERVENTION · CORRUPTION
ANTI-HAND ANTI-CO-AUTHOR FROM THE FUTURE TO BE OVERWRITTEN STORED WITH REGRETS
ENTRY
Post-2022 Generative Expansion · New Folder Series · Fudge/AI XOR.
Since 2022 Night Driving has expanded to include AI-generated files that extend the field of simulacra into generative territory. The machine generates effects that never existed, or were not yet written, past and present operations with no author.
A MODEL CO-REWRITES IN THE PLURAL
AI Operations · Post-2022 · Rewriting · XOR Territory
Since 2022, machine learning and generative AI have entered the artist's practice as conceptual tools, not for image generation but for intervention, disruption, co-authorship, and the systematic rewriting of files that have been stored in Hard Drives alongside their author's regrets. The operation is applied to the existing work: early vector and raster files from the 1990s and 2000s submitted to processes not possible at the time, rejected iterations retrieved from folders named To Be Overwritten and WrittenRong, failed files co-failed again by a collaborator that reads surface without memory and rewrites without intent. For Fudge, the model is an anti-hand: a co-author rewriting from the future into material that was already historical.
Authorless Rewrites.
The folders named To Be Overwritten are the operative objects in this sub-entry. They are not trash folders and the files were never deleted. They are holding spaces for rejected iterations, failed experiments, outputs that did not satisfy the conditions of the work they were part of. What is remarkable, retrospectively, is that the name already contains a future: to be overwritten, not overwritten and closed. The files were stored with their regrets, as Duchamp stored objects in the Boîte, not because they were finished but because they were not yet finished being what they might become.
The AI operation retrieves these files and applies processes the files were not made for. A vector self-portrait from a sketchbook, (re)constructed in Illustrator 8.0.1, every line a deliberate path, is submitted to Gen-Expand in Photoshop (Beta), which reads it as a distribution of marks and proposes a continuation. The resulting anti-buste: the head and face held intact, the jacket allowed to disintegrate into generative mark-making that has never touched a surface. The portrait resists completion as a portrait by expanding into its own undoing. The jacket is there and is not there. The seam between hand and generation is the work.
The Photoshop window piece operates differently. An empty application window, Untitled-1, RGB, 1:3, 17.9M, is made to contain a landscape: the desert prompt fed into the blank document, producing a mauve and terracotta and pale-mint scene in flat vector shapes that answer the early Illustrator palette without knowing it. Behind the chrome, the desktop wallpaper is a zoomed-in pixel field from Last Year at Marienbad, itself a prior AI operation on an earlier Illustrator construction, now granulated into a grey-on-grey abstraction at the scale of individual pixels. Two historical layers then, the 1990s software, the 1961 film, held together by an AI operation that was not asked to harmonize them. It produced the image for the empty window without being told the window already had a history.
The model is not a tool for making images. It is a conceptual frame, a mode of returning to the file with a reading apparatus that has no biographical knowledge of the material it reads, no access to the intentions that produced it, no memory of the failures that preceded it. This is precisely what makes it useful.
The conceptual vocabulary for these operations is not technical: intervene, disrupt, corrupt, co-author, rewrite, re-writerong. The last term is not a typo, it names the operation where the rewriting itself goes wrong, where the file is written incorrectly and the incorrectness is retained. Failure is not an accident to be corrected; it is a condition to be worked with. The rejected file is not inferior to the accepted one, it is a file whose rejection was premature, whose time had not yet come.
XOR territory names the authorship condition with precision. The exclusive or: a work that is either Fudge or AI-generated, not both simultaneously, not neither. Applied to the Digital Boîte, XOR proposes that the files in To Be Overwritten are now in a state of indeterminate authorship: they were first made by hand, then re-made by a process that reads hand-marks as data, then judged and selected and sometimes discarded again by the hand. Authorship oscillates. The work exists at the hinge.
Fresh French Tires: the phrase names what AI/ML brings to the encounter with the 1990s Boîte. New treads on old road. Technology is not nostalgic and not interested in period, it reads Illustrator 8.0.1 vectors as a context window, extracts statistical conditions, and proposes continuations that are formally consistent with the source while being ontologically elsewhere. This is not restoration. It is not completion. It is a new pass over old ground with instruments that did not exist when the ground was first covered.
CHANCE OPERATIONS:
INTERVENE
Gen-Expand on vector source
Early Illustrator files submitted to generative expansion in Photoshop (Beta). The model reads vector paths as mark distributions and continues them in directions the original construction did not take. The source is not replaced; it is extended into territory the artist could not anticipate.
CO-AUTHORSHIP
Anti-buste as self-portrait
A vector self-portrait submitted to Gen-Expand below the neck. The head is held; the body below is chance-generated. The portrait becomes an anti-buste: the convention of the composed bust portrait inverted by an expansion that disintegrates into its own mark-making. Head and jacket are not the same work.
REWRITE / RE-WRITERONG
Failed file. Co-failed again.
Rejected iterations retrieved from To Be Overwritten and submitted to further AI process. The file fails again, fails differently. The second failure is not corrected, it is simply evaluated against the conditions of the first. Some outcomes are retained. The failure accumulates into a work.
DISRUPT
Historical layering: Alain Resnais pixel field
An earlier AI operation on an Illustrator 8.0.1 construction of a Last Year at Marienbad still, now zoomed to pixel scale and used as desktop wallpaper behind the empty Photoshop chrome. Three temporal layers: 1961 film, 1990s vector construction, 2020s AI expansion held in a single image without synthesis.
CORRUPT
Anti-rendering an empty Photoshop document.
An empty Photoshop window is filled by AI with an image the window was not designed to contain. The application chrome, the scaffold of productive intent, is unaltered while the content arrives from outside the program's history. The document is populated without being authored.
DISPLACE
Fresh French Tires for the Boîte's later rendezvous
The sustained methodological position: AI/ML as a mode of returning to the 1990s–2000s archive with reading instruments that have no biographical access to the material. New treads on old road. The archive does not become historical, it becomes available again, differently.
WORKS — SELECTED EXAMPLES
Self Portrait in Profile_3 Gen-Expand · anti-buste
Vector self-portrait, sketchbook origin, submitted to Gen-Expand below the shoulder line. Head, face, and neck rendered as deliberate contour; jacket and lower body generated as expressive dissolution, simulated hatching and splayed marks that have never touched paper. The seam between hand-drawn profile and generated body is the epistemological hinge of the work. Anti-buste: the bust portrait convention (composed head + shoulders) inverted by an expansion that disintegrates rather than completes.
AP v 2.5 / OS v 7.5 / LYAM 4.2 AI anti-render · desktop archaeology
Empty Photoshop window, Untitled-1, RGB, 1:3, 17.9M, filled by AI with a desert landscape in the palette of the early Illustrator work (mauve, lavender, terracotta, pale mint), all flat vector shapes, formally consistent with 1990s construction methods without having been produced by them. Desktop wallpaper: a zoomed detail of an Illustrator 8.0.1 vector construction of a Last Year at Marienbad still, previously Illustrator-processed, now at pixel scale, grey-on-grey abstraction. The title names three version numbers: Adobe Photoshop, the operating system, and the Resnais film. Everything was built with vectors.
RE-WRITERONG
Not a typo. The operation in which the rewriting itself fails and the failure is retained as outcome rather than corrected.
TO BE OVERWRITTEN
Folder name: a holding space for rejected iterations stored not as trash but as deferred possibilities. The name already contains the future operation.
ANTI-HAND
The model as a co-author that has never touched a surface, reads marks as data distributions, and proposes continuations without biographical knowledge of the source.
FRESH FRENCH TIRES
New treads on old road. AI/ML returning to the 1990s–2000s archive with reading instruments that did not exist when the material was first made.
ANTI-BUSTE
The bust portrait inverted — head held intact, body below disintegrating into generated marks. Completion replaced by dissolution.
XOR TERRITORY
Works in which authorship is either human or machine — not both simultaneously, not neither. The gate that does not close.
STORED WITH REGRETS
After Duchamp. Rejected files held, delayed, not deleted, in archive folders. The regret is not permanent; it is deferred pending a future operation.
ANTI-RENDER
The operation of filling an empty application window with generated content. The scaffold of productive intent populated from outside the work's own history.
SCHEMA:
NIGHT DRIVING — AI OPERATIONS — OPERATIVE LOGIC
operation_mode: conceptual_tool: image_generation
writeable_status: 1990s–2000s_vectors_rasters · future chance operations_rendezvous
folder: To_Be_Overwritten · stored_with_regrets (Duchamp) · deferred
AI_role: anti-hand · anti-co-author_past_future · reads_surface_not_intention
authorship: XOR (Fudge, model) · oscillates · hinge_does_not_close
failure_status: retained · co-failed_again · re-writerong · productive
fresh_french_tires: new_treads · old_road · archive_made_available_again
image_generation: instrument_of_subversion · not_end_in_itself
darkness: epistemological_condition · unchanged · now_also_temporal
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NIGHT DRIVING — AI OPERATIONS · POST-2022
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