ClownVamp Invades Marfa with The Junk Machine

The Junk Machine
ClownVamp
Do Right Hall

Marfa Texas

 By DAVID JAGER November 26, 2024

Imagine a future where the already overwhelming deluge of advertising, infomercial and late-night commercial pablum has been coopted by AI. Instead of influencers and meme engineers uploading the latest info dump, artificial intelligence does it all on its own. Artificial intelligence, with its unreal ability to compile imagery faster than the speed of human thought, with nary a twinge of human comprehension. Imagine the future of capitalism as its own self-contained, self-generating machine, where AI allows the economy to automatically generate its own advertising. 

This is the hair-raising scenario currently being explored by the guerilla tech artist ClownVamp, who has harnessed his programming and info tech prowess to high concept art making. At the Do Right Hall, a free public gallery space in the Texas town of Marfa, ClownVamp- half clown, half vampire- produced an eerie window into a bleeding edge phenomenon that is already here: self-generative art. 

The entire show centers around a hot fuchsia printer called “The Junk Machine”, a roll printer hooked up to a powerful artificial intelligence that is able to independently generate an endless stream of advertising with the help of an algorithm that draws on a vast database of images. Sitting in the middle of a large rectangular table at the gallery center, the junk machine can produce a brand-new printed advertisement with the push of a large pink button that sits next to it. The image generation is instant, and the table is littered with them. 

Attempts at making machines that produce art have dogged us throughout art history, the most obvious culprit being the camera, though it’s complex relationship with the hand and eye behind the lens have left its purely mechanical bonafides in limbo. Fifteen years ago, the artist Ben Grosser invented his interactive robotic painting machine, which used a mounted robotic nozzle loaded with paint to produce pleasingly bland abstractions based on sound prompts from gallery goers.

ClownVamp, however, takes this concept one step further, as his algorithm has the ability to spontaneously produce an infinite variety of images based entirely on programmed prompts. We have, in other words, a slightly more elaborate version of current AI image generators that rely on photographs and found images to reconfigure into art. 

ClownVamp’s image algorithm does not rely on a pool of imagery culled from the internet at large however. Instead he has instilled very clever aesthetic parameters into his image generating machine. Specifying, for example that the models contained within each advert resembles TV and Film stars of the 80’s, and that the graphic style itself confines itself to that era as well. Due to this canny stroke of genius, what we have is a machine that produces endless variations of young David Hasselhoff or Olivia Newton John hawking everything from steroids and automatic weapons to steak, cars, hard drugs and lobster.

The results are predictably dazzling and horrifying. Built along a graphic design template that is half Women’s Wear Daily, half 80’s era Hustler Magazine, the profoundly creepy derealization of artificial intelligence melds with the already boundary pushing unreality of eighties beauty and advertising standards. All of it in high-resolution nauseatingly glossy shades of pink. So much pink.

If there was something slightly off about the already airbrushed perfection of TV and Film stars such as Cheryl Tiegs and Heather Locklear in their thirties, handing their perfectly contoured faces and eighties coifs to an inhuman machine intelligence makes them downright sinister. We see the avatars of eighties for what they are. Archetypes used to sell by any means necessary. Their faces are not so much individual as they are accessories to slogans and commodities.  The blonde is as much a product as the devil’s food cake or poppers, in other words. This is made all the more disconcerting because of the way slogans and ad copy, following the dictates of AI, are often misspelled in robotic fashion.

‘SStTTTeeeak’ blares out one advertisement, accompanied by nothing but an indecipherable machine generated Cyrillic, while a man with chestnut hair and chiselled jaw smiles brilliantly over a hunk of char-broiled perfection. Looking at him you realize that the hand is off, with one too many digits. This is par for the course, actually. Deformities and mutatioins abound, with a perky blond woman with deformed double hands sporting two impossible pistols. Another leggy model leans provocatively against a pink station wagon sprouting a third leg, while another has morphed into conjoined twins. A glossy, gleeful perversity reigns.

Several things are happening here, all of them designed to make us queasy. We sense the imponderable deadness of machine intelligence coupled with inhuman efficiency and speed, the terrible implications of something completely unalive and wildly fast. We are also put on the back foot by its uncanny effectiveness. The machine may not contain a whisper of self-awareness, but it can still advertise. Even when it gets the spelling wrong.

Which is to say that ClownVamp’s AI doesn’t understand the lyrics of advertising, but it sure as hell can hum the tune, and with uncanny accuracy. One is even more chilled to realize that as humans-given that so many of our responses to stimuli are as mechanical as the machines we program- we are still responsive to it. The derealized human avatars remain appealing, in some limbic recess of our brain, and we find ourselves wanting to buy a car, eat a steak and fire a gun. The effect is hilarious, sickening, and terrifying all at once.  

If you want to get a grim sense of the future, stare down a machine generated woman who resembles Meredith Baxter Burney grinning as her hand turns into a lobster claw. Dystopian doesn’t even begin to cover it. You start to see a world where mutant artificial advertising is sprayed out at a rate that makes todays already overwhelming social media saturation look tame. If the machines take over, we are about to drink from the firehose. Junk machine indeed.

This is part of the reason why ClownVamp decided on a physical machine creating actual printed artifacts. The raison d’etre for the fuscia laser printer has something to do with making the impact of digital AI more tangible in an analog sense. They explain:

“We’re used to seeing all of this spontaneous generation of material in a digital interface, like Chat GPT. When it happens on a screen we’re used to the speed. When these images are instantaneously printed in the world, however, when they become real analog artifactsyou can hold in your hands, the speed is what really strikes people. It’s eerie, or creepy even. I’ve created a machine that helps people understand how ominously instantaneous this is.”

Along with the central machine and its nightmarish advertising generator are choice advertising samples hung on the gallery walls as one offs. Ssssteeroidds says one, featuring a bodybuilder with proportions only slightly more engorged and ridiculous than the ones that are currently featured at this year’s Mr. Olympia. One has the nagging idea that actual humans won’t be that far behind. 

Also featured are iphones featuring AI generated salespeople who gave tailored pitches to viewers as soon as they are within view. Like the advertising, these computer-generated humans give us a similitude of the human, just human like enough to give us a sense of interaction before we are overtaken by the feeling we aren’t interacting with anyone at all. It’s a glimpse into the uncanny valley that is the future of artificial intelligence, pointing to a time where human desire and interactions will be governed not by other humans, but by algorithmic processes that mimic them ever so imperfectly.

What will happen in a future where the inhuman and the mechanical mimic the human so perfectly our desires will be governed not by the whims of others, but by algorithms programmed by corporations? ClownVamp is giving us a glimpse, and it looks glossy, pink, and all too chilling. In the meantime, the Junk Machine’s reign is far from over. It will be coming soon to a town near you, if not directly into your iphone. WM