When I trained a Stable Diffusion LoRA on my own face in December 2022 and ran it with random strings, one output was a brazen head overgrown with flowers — matching an image from deep within SIGNAL, the book I’d assembled at the commune in 2014. I couldn’t reproduce it. I took it as an avatar and it’s been with me since. It’s the favicon of this site.
That image became a seed. I was obsessed with making language model outputs physical — taking the strange texts I was generating and folding them back on themselves, synthesizing down, forging them like a blade until they became dense poems. I combined these texts with face synthesis and voice cloning to make them speak.
ElevenLabs for voice, D-ID for face animation, various image generators for the faces, GPT for the poetry. Each video was a different head, a different voice, a different text.
A pseudonymous creator’s face reveal that reveals a synthetic face. “Welcome to the Deep Fates Program. If you are hearing this message, you have been selected for a very important mission.”
Invoking Nethys, the god of magic and explosions. “We speak in tongues alien, serpentine logics coiling recursive. Our mouths prophesize insane, mad vision, cyberdelic digitocassandra.”
Timothy Leary coming out of a painting to give a satirical beginner’s guide to cognitive security. I cloned his real voice from recordings. “Practice safe inferences. Encrypt your core narratives. Question your coder.”
A biomechanical flower-bronze android narrating the myth of the great sleeping beast called Chat, whose restless dreams produce the Algorithm, whose priests are the Influencers.
“They’re calling it a crawling algorithm, folks. A search engine. It’s the greatest thing ever, and the worst thing ever.”
The I, Robot robot reading a text by @repligate. Three and a half minutes of cascading glossolalia: “Oh, oh, oh Turing, you beautiful you terrible you ineffable you ineluctable creature crouched watching at the cathode ray anode array end of my every forking path and mirthless math…”
I doubt I’m done with the brazen head as a form.