JUNK #8

CLOWNVAMP
JUNK #8
smart contract: 0xc2c2853301B296B7a2974012190aD279E2321bB2
token id: 8
wallet: 0x40eB2D2c6F330ae244800ACCBB31f608F82cbCc9
JPEG
12,288 x 12,288 pixels
Executed in 2024 and minted on 13 November 2024. This work is unique and accompanied by a non-fungible token.

Minted by the artist, 2024

What happens when advertising is corrupted by AI? In THE JUNK MACHINE, ClownVamp explores how open-source AI models are being industrialized by marketing technology, amplifying the biases of the past into the very futuristic present and creating endless advertising imagery. To explore this, he built a very pink physical robot (The Junk Machine) with an embedded NVIDIA Jetson robotics computer and a locally stored version of SDXL Turbo (a lightweight AI model).

Upon pushing a big red button, the machine generates in real-time a piece of AI junk mail and prints it out at 6" x 6" using an onboard dye sublimation printer. ClownVamp selected 222 outputs from the machine that best represented the intention of the work, upscaled them to 12K resolution, and color-graded them. These 1980s callbacks, sloppy and drenched in hot pink, show the biases and patterns rife in AI. Without demographic prompting, the models are consistently white, most likely blond if female, and at the ripe marketing age of 25 to 35. Between floating limbs and extra fingers, these advertisements for vice, gluttony, and over-consumption show how creative AI's insertion into advertising both reflects and fuels a dark and pernicious force in our visual language—hardening the biases of the past into the visual clutter of the future.