autopoeisic transmogrification fragment #001

These two NFTs are from Memo Atken’s Autopoeisic Transmogrification Fragments, a collection of short videos generated using custom AI software. The project exemplifies Atken’s sustained use of emerging technologies to explore philosophical and spiritual questions about the nature of life, intelligence, and consciousness. 

Each fragment is a short video in a seamless loop, depicting a continuously morphing cephalopod-like creature. For Atken, cephalopods serve as a symbol for nonhuman forms of cognition, spanning from organic to machine systems, and an invitation to “embrace the interconnectedness” of all things. The word “autopoeisic” alludes to the biological term for a self-producing and self-maintaining system, such as a living cell. The audio was composed by the artist on synths. 

The collection is an extension of a previous NFT collection, Distributed Consciousness (2021), which features 256 still images of “Tentacular Critters” created using a customized version of an early text-to-image generative AI model, VQGAN+CLIP. After the release, Atken continued generating these images, which he then used as the training data for another generative model, StyleGAN3, to create the videos in Autopoeisic Transmogrification Fragments. 

There are six fragments in varying edition sizes. The first five were minted for the launch of the (now defunct) Tezos-based NFT platform Versum.