GANS video, choral work by Shara Nova,
9 minutes (est) looped digital animation
https://vimeo.com/730375490
PW: jamescohan48

'Caudex', 2022, a film by Ritchie, captures snapshots of the GANs as it runs through multiple serial progressions–what the artist terms “code walks”–in which new forms emerge and recede, guided by the artist’s hand and resembling a blooming garden of converging data.

Ritchie trained the GANs to adapt images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, producing a style that evokes medieval manuscripts, the drawings of old masters, and botanical illustrations, but manipulated into dreamlike, even monstrous subversions of natural imagery. The film traces the cumulative growth of new forms as they follow a serial path from the observable past to an unpredictable future.

Like many of Ritchie’s works, the title has multiple meanings. It refers to the caudex of a plant, or the portion of the root stem in which the plant’s DNA is grown. But it also recalls the term codex–a book bound in the modern manner by joining pages, as opposed to a rolled scroll that was common before bound manuscripts. Finally, the title motions towards codec (connecting the terms "coder/decoder"), in reference to computer programs and programmers working with data streams and signals. The multiple meanings here recall Ritchie’s claim that “Code is always seeking form. Nature is everywhere, even in mathematics. In the GAN garden, computational kudzu grows from bramble into thorn, from bird into flower, efflorescing into endless trefoils–Celtic psychedelia meeting twenty-first-century code in a glimpse of a new kind of artificial nature.”

A haunting choral score by Shara Nova accompanies the shifting images. Written by Ritchie and Nova, the song explores the role of artificial intelligence in contemporary life and meditates on themes found in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Together, they weave connections between disparate images and sound, and imagines what might exist in the space between them.