Dr. Ellen Pearlman: Language Is Leaving Me: Epigenetic memory in multilingual visual and verbal AI

In 2021 Open AI released CLIP and VQGAN, neural network architectures for still and nascent moving text-to-image models. The response was overwhelming though in the rush to implementation issues surrounding data sources, algorithmic parameters and prompt engineering were deemphasized. Language Is Leaving Me – An AI Cinematic Opera Of The Skin, a mixed realty performance installations focuses on AI, algorithmic rendering, sound, and biometrics through the lens of epigenetic, or inherited traumatic memories of cultures of diaspora. Examining multi-lingual multi-visual renderings of prompt engineering combined with Stable Diffusion image-to- image comparisons it reveals inherent structural flaws and biases highlighting challenges for emerging visual taxonomy’s representation of non-quantifiable human experiences across cross-cultural dimensions.