Abschnittstitel

For Patrick Castellani, Generative AI and their pattern algorithms offer an "indirect glimpse" into the collective unconscious, the Jungian space filled with the images, language, and metaphors of (Western) culture. In his experimental installation LIEVS (2024), he deploys Generative AI like a submarine to explore the "deep sea" and the bizarre "deep sea creatures" within. These entities, shaped by time and pressure, reveal the forces that weave the fabric of reality, shaping the construction of personas, identity, and our self-narratives, and ultimately casting a shadow of the human condition itself onto a distant cave wall.

With LIEVS, Patrick Castellani has created a series of seven family photos from seven different lives—ranging from toddler, child, teenager, young adult, adult, senior, to the elderly on their deathbed. Except for one, all these lives are fictional. They never actually occurred but could have, with slight alterations in parameters. The series of images from these various lives generates a startling sense of plausibility while simultaneously invoking skepticism. The developmental logic of these personas is too linear and nearly deterministic, hinting at a hidden hyperreality from which both artificial pattern generators like AI and the artist's subconscious–an other marvelous pattern-detecting-device–distilling coherence and causal orientation from the noise of reality, draw. Like a counterpoint, the only real life of the artist, ‘Ground Zero’, stands out: these images show no narrative progression but rather convey the inherent complexity and lack of linearity in actual human experiences. This life is described as having ‘no clear development or orientation’, but rather an ‘essence’ that captures the true complexity of lived reality, propagated through time from snapshot to snapshot.

The seven lives of Patrick Castellani can be explored with an old slide projector, an analogue magic lantern that was still in use worldwide until the end of the 1990s to tell stories of successful lives with impressive images in convivial gatherings. At first glance, the medium counterpoints the artificially generated images of the AI. At second glance, however, it lends the narrative a haptic reality and creates an authentic plausibility. Castellani invites the viewer to engage playfully with this oscillating ambivalence and to be guided and deceived by the "what if...".

Castellani recommends the following question as a lifeline for the deep-dive:

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• How does my biography change when I begin to alter certain parameters (parents, gender, attachment type, etc.) and retell them thousands of times using probabilistic pattern generation engines (AI)?

• What lives could have been possible, and what does the topography of my entire space of contingency and potential look like?

• Where do archetypes end, where do personas begin, and how does the unique individual identity emerge from this complex interplay?

The installation LIEVS seeks to challenge simplistic notions of identity and compels us to confront the subjective, interpretive nature of our self-understanding. It explores how the stories we tell about ourselves are shaped and curated by our perceptions, cultural models, narratives, and our phenomenological expression in a four-dimensional space.

LIEVS may provide the viewer with discrete clues on how to rewrite biographies and how to use the process of kaleidoscopic “identiaition” to distill one's own essence. It also reconnects one to an eternal presence that ultimately dreams the multitude of his own here and now. True fullness of life is found not only within the smooth projections of crafted narratives but also in the wild potential of our unshaped existence and the freedom that comes with uncertainty.