Addressing a burgeoning AI religiosity in the tech industry, IUDICIUM is a multimedia installation that frames AI-driven evaluation as modes of religious judgment. From assessing financial risk and medical ailments to calculating consumer choice and targets of war, AI systems analyze data in order to automate decisions, carrying benign and revelatory consequences. Far from purely technical, much of automated decision-making exists within a broader context of Silicon Valley ideologies that direct AI toward neoliberal, techno-utopian ends. A component of this ideology is a religious eschatology, manifesting through the belief that AI can generate and deliver just destinies to humanity, whether transformation and liberation or punishment and death. IUDICIUM exposes this computational world of divine judgment, where artificial intelligence exists alongside corporate gods, mystical glyphs, religious icons, occult sigils, and captured bodies.

Presented as a computational re-imagining of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco that covers the Sistine Chapel’s altar wall, IUDICIUM consists of a towering computer graphics painting projected in a darkened space of worship, accompanied by a soundtrack composed from machine learning-generated text and audio. IUDICIUM takes its name from the AI god of judgement the installation conjures, a flesh-eating arbiter who keeps humanity incessantly subjected to modes of judgment, promising immortality and transcendence to an elite class and domination for the rest.

At the center of the painting, an ornate black cube rotates, displaying glowing red sigils and occult diagrams on each of its sides. Evoking the puzzle box of Clive Barker’s horror film Hellraiser, black box computational systems, and the bounding boxes of AI image processing, this die–a predictive technology–determines the fate of those awaiting the god’s judgment. The esoteric symbology on the cube’s faces combines biometric abstraction, sacred geometry, neural network diagrams, etchings of torture devices, and religious icons. One side features the outline of a captured body taken from the interface of an airport security body scanner, while another shows the monas hieroglyphica, an emblem of Elizabethan mystic-mathematician-imperialist John Dee. Additional symbols and sigils appear from previous works Contra-Internet (2015-19), Sanctum (2018), Icosahedron (2019), and The Doors (2019). Surrounding the black cube, fragmented chunks of face cages, based on biometric facial mapping, float and spin, while the god’s hands, rendered as Spanish Ticklers, roll the die. 

A digitally modulated voice performs a sermon in a distorted growl. Its sinister proclamations were built from machine learning-generated text output from models trained on tech corporation mission statements, eschatological religious texts, philosophical writing on morality and justice, apocalyptic science fiction, and sermons about divine judgement. Machine learning was also used to produce the music and atmospheric audio, trance-like droning that accompanies the speech. 

Everybody shall be judged. Exposing our desire for its algorithmic arbitration and demanding our obedience, the god reduces flesh to abstraction, remaking human anatomies into the data it consumes. 

IUDICIUM is a companion piece to Blas’s Silicon Traces trilogy, a series of moving image installations that contends with the beliefs, fantasies, and histories influential to Silicon Valley’s visions of the future. The AI god of judgment first introduced in IUDICIUM is featured in CULTUS, the second installment of the trilogy.

Credits

• Commissioned for the 2022 MUNCH Triennale and supported by the Tallinn Art Hall Foundation
• Computer Graphics: Harry Sanderson
• Machine Learning Engineers:  Ashwin D’Cruz and Christopher Tegho
• Audio: xin
• Additional Audio Engineering: Aya Sinclair