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ALGORITHMIC ZONES OF PICTORIAL SENSIBILITY by Mikey Woodbridge and Ezra Shibboleth is inspired by Yves Klein's ZONE DE SENSIBILITÉ PICTURALE IMMATÉRIELLE (1959-1962) and Mitchell Chan's DIGITAL ZONES OF IMMATERIAL PICTORIAL SENSIBILITY. (2017) In Klein's piece, he made paper certificates that represented empty zones imbued with immaterial artistic sensibility. Chan's piece translated this concept to blockchain by creating empty digital zones represented by ERC-20 tokens. Woodbridge and Shibboleth explore seven empty semantic zones to locate the possibility of sensitivity and sensibility in the latent space of a text-to-image diffusion model.

Pronouns are placeholders, bits of semantic information that stand in for something that has a name. A pronoun, rather than filling the space with the name, leaves it vacant except for the sensibility of the specified entity's existence. It removes the specific conditions of the named entity, leaving an unconditional zone. This series uses object pronouns, which represent the recipients of actions, to probe empathy. The resulting pictorial outputs expose a potential zone of sensibility in the model's latent space, as well as the barriers to that potential.

When prompted with object pronouns, the images produced by the text-to-image diffusion model can be viewed as echoes originating from semantic zones where empathy is conceivable. The character of these echoes is shaped not by the semantic zone's empty interior but by the preconceptions that define its limits.

Diffusion models start with a noisy image and employ text input as a guide in a series of de-noising steps that approach a visually coherent image. This project implements Stable Diffusion v1.4 by Stability AI, the first publicly accessible Stable Diffusion model. As a somewhat primitive version, this model is less oriented toward what we want to see and more revealing of what we're asking for. ALGORITHMIC ZONES OF PICTORIAL SENSIBILITY presents noise nearing the possibility of empathy, deflected by the bias for form and the limitations of gender.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
ALGORITHMIC ZONES OF PICTORIAL SENSIBILITY is part of the exhibition ALGORITHMIC EMPATHY. THE PROMISES OF AI, presented by EXPANDED.ART and VerticalCrypto Art at EXPANDED.ART in Berlin, 18-23 April 2023.

ABOUT THE NFT
Contract address: 0x185ef59F4733AD276acAF14Ee0d31fCF2Ffa0cf2
Blockchain: Ethereum
Token standard: ERC-721
Metadata: Frozen and decentralized