Pangrams from the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus
Pangrams from the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus is a multimedia installation that examines artificial intelligence and the implications of these technologies on contemporary visual culture. The basis of this project is a working typeface created with the assistance of AI, which blends two of the most ubiquitous typefaces: Times New Roman and Arial. We get a strange mix that feels vaguely familiar and otherworldly at the same time, the same way that AI “hallucinates” and adds impossible appendages to otherwise perfectly representational figurative images. Playing off the concept of the typographic specimen, this installation includes a series of pangrams generated by ChatGPT. Pangrams are phrases that contain every letter of the alphabet at least once. We look through the slick surface of the fluorescent panels to see a physical system of supports and screens with an exposed CPU and wiring. The screen features a website with continuously changing imagery and text generated by AI. Many AI models are trained from the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus, a dataset representative of the entire public web, captured at specific moments in time. As Franco “Bifo” Birardi writes, AI is like a “brain with no organs.” What happens when this corpus or body hiccups and hallucinates, giving us language and typographic form as a way to think through our disorientation—or reorientation—with form and content through AI?
