Marie Antoinette After the Singularity #1 and Marie Antoinette After the Singularity #2

GRIMES, MAC BOUCHER, MARIYA JACOBO, EURYPHEUS
Marie Antoinette After the Singularity #1 and Marie Antoinette After the Singularity #2
(i)
Marie Antoinette After the Singularity #1
jacquard-woven tapestry, text-to-image generating tools (DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable-Diffusion)
78 x 78 in. (198 x 198 cm.)
This work is number one from an edition of five plus two artist proofs.
Executed in 2024

(ii)
Marie Antoinette After the Singularity #2
jacquard-woven tapestry, text-to-image generating tools (DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable-Diffusion)
78 x 78 in. (198 x 198 cm.)
This work is number one from an edition of five plus two artist proofs.
Executed in 2024

The artist via Misalignment AI Museum

Factum Arte worked in collaboration with Canadian music and visual artist Grimes, the Misalignment AI Museum in San Francisco and Eurypheus to produce a series of tapestries based on two AI-generated images prompted to create in the Rococo style, and in reference to the concept of “technological singularity”. The “singularity” is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilisation.

Factum Arte's Textile Department worked to translate the two digital images into the language of weaving. The tapestries were woven on a mechanical, digital Jacquard loom with a simple composition (1 yarn). The process required a carefully selected blend of colors, with a combination of threads from cotton to merino wool and cashmere, which helped creating a complex piece with luminosity and a range of shades required.

The final weaving files were designed by Marcos Ludueña-Segre and woven at Flanders Tapestries in Belgium.

"The Rococo image may be a pun alluding to 'Roko’s Basilisk.' The Rococo Basilisk a vengeful Artificial super intelligence who takes the physical form of a cyborg Marie Antoinette. Rococo Basilisk is a play on words, mixing Roko’s basilisk and Rococo. Rokos basilisk can be summarized as “a thought experiment that involves the potential development of an all-powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) entity. The theory proposes that such an entity could punish individuals who were aware of its creation but failed to contribute to its development”. Rococo is 'an exceptionally ornamental and dramatic style of architecture, art and decoration' that is often accused of being 'superficial, frivolous, immoral and purely decorative'.

Marie Antoinette and AI have a lot in common. From metropolis to HER to M3GAN, AI is often depicted in the body of a beautiful young woman. Like Marie Antoinette, these figures have come to exist in pop culture as strange puppets, placed in power by male architects to act as beautiful, sexualized scapegoats for the failings of their respective empires. Generative AI art, like Marie Antoinette, has instigated a populist uprising against a symbolic aesthetic excess that's much easier to demonize than the mundane bureaucratic corruption that’s actually to blame for the failings of late stage empire. Rococo suffers the same artistic criticisms as AI writing and art, namely that it “it lacks a soul” and has few stand out enduring works, whilst nonetheless being the defining art of their day, much to the chagrin of their detractors.

In the spirit of 'let them eat cake,' the Rococo Basilisk is obnoxiously flippant of AI safety concerns."

– Grimes and Audrey Kim (The Misalignment Museum) on Marie Antoinette After the Singularity