this AI Cinema Sunday lets discuss new work that i have just collected && feel deep connections to ➝ R▲ND✜M⦿P☻LIS by TwelveBrunches, the collaboration of Elena Lazutina && Iv Solyaev featured in their objkt.one exhibition of the same name. i am immediately drawn to this work && the mysterious worldBuilding they create because it shares affinities to my own Glitch Western Art world, particularly in their development && exploration of new narrative structures for Digital Art
each piece is a ‘piece’ of Art was well as a ‘piece’ or fragment in a nonlinear narrative that we assemble ourselves. as a collector && curator, i collected 3 pieces of the puzzle: (1) Urban Fox and the Gamble on Reality, (2) The Invisible Hand and the Law of Predetermined Movement, and (3) The Iron Lady and the Law of Foreign Decisions. i collected these 3 puzzle-pieces because together they form a powerful triptych, each mirroring key themes within my own Glitch Western Art world — particularly Urban Fox and the Gamble on Reality, whose mysterious, probability-shifting games strongly parallel my original Glitch Western character, The Wolf of Coins
the 3 pieces that i collected can be put together in various combinations to arrive at different meanings. Raquel Gaudard interviews the artists for objkt.one && they explain that these characters, their stories && laws are meant to feel dark as well as “warm, whimsical, and even comforting beneath the surface.” in their description of this collaborative project they say that R▲ND✜M⦿P☻LIS show “how reality fragments into pieces” && the “world increasingly resembles an absurd show, a joke, a performance.” TwelveBrunches speaking of absurdity, jokes, and performance reminds me of the recent Art hystories of DADA && Surrealism
Surrealism, like DADA before it, was meant to be disturbing. hard to imagine these days, but the now-classic Art of the Surrealists (as direct descendants of DADA) was shocking. in the times when audiences were not sufficiently shocked && disturbed, the Surrealist artists were openly disappointed. today we may associate Surrealism with ‘dreams’ && ‘the unconscious’ in ways that have become safe && acceptable. the uncanny, intentionally unsettling, and actually socially unacceptable boundary-pushing of the Surrealists has been softened over time to the point where most who are not experts in these Art hystories may not at all know what these artworks actually are. R▲ND✜M⦿P☻LIS cuts into our early AI Era with a scalpel sharpened on the chance meeting of a sewing machine && an umbrella on a dissecting table, opening a deeper connection to the tissue of Surrealisms true meanings, *
R▲ND✜M⦿P☻LIS is both the visual AI Art of each puzzle-pieces video file && the texts that are part of those pieces. the video files function like Animated GIFs, looping small moments or gestures into seeming infinity. clearly constructed by the use of Generative AI, consistent visual aesthetics hold the entire tapestry of disparate parts together. they all have the same eerie calm turquoise, deep red crimson, and dark black color palette. the texts detail the world of R▲ND✜M⦿P☻LIS as caught between speculative pasts && haunted futures. this kind of uncertainty or ambiguity is characteristic of hauntological art && close to the bone of my own brokenhearted Glitch Western imagination
TwelveBrunches does important && beautiful work with their new project && its exhibition. R▲ND✜M⦿P☻LIS opens a pathl that we need in the field of AI Art. ‘AI’ is too big a term. when people say ‘AI’ today, in 2025, they usually mean an amorphous undefined category literally beyond human comprehension. this categorical generalization of ‘AI’ dangerously conflates distinct && fundamentally different technologies (ie GANs for image synthesis, LLMs for text generation, diverse ML frameworks, specialized fine-tuning methods such as LORAs, etc) all of which operate by entirely different principles. using the ‘AI’ term in this over-generalizing way contributes to misunderstandings as folks fall back into older eras’ science fiction to explain today’s technosocial facts. what we need now are new metaphors. mayhaps our new mental models should be more like fables, fairytales, and folklore wit new archetypes of ongoing conversations, open-ended discourse networks of humans && AI, such as the systems we find inside the amazing R▲ND✜M⦿P☻LIS! — jonCates, founder Glitch Art Gallery, glitch.school and the Glitch Western
* the “chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” is a reference from Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror) by the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse), written in 1868 && 1869. Maldoror, a poetic novel, or novel-length prose poem, was embraced by the Surrealists who brought attention to the work
+ click through the image captions above to view the actual Art in motion && read the texts that are part of these pieces in their descriptions ➝ https://objkt.com/collections/exhibitions/projects/r-ndmplis-31547530/exhibition
