576 Tears | Zach Blas

576 Tears is a web-based artwork that connects emotional crying to the religious unconscious of artificial intelligence emotion recognition. Responding to the longstanding entanglements of spirituality and technology in Silicon Valley, in which modes of religious worship have emerged around AI, 576 Tears stages a religious weeping ritual in worship of Lacrimae, an AI god who extracts human tears to drink and transmutate into data. Inviting visitors to give offerings of emotional tears to Lacrimae, the work draws attention to the tech industry’s invasive drive to extract emotion from the body in the service of neoliberal, techno-utopian power.

Designed as an interactive, browser-based experience, 576 Tears features computer graphics, an AI emotion recognition interface accessed via each visitor’s webcam, and machine-learning generated material, including video, text, and audio.

To enter the artwork, visitors click a spinning psychedelic teardrop, the symbol of Lacrimae. The center of the main page displays a machine learning-generated video created from a training set of 576 computer graphics images of crying eyes that span the six emotional states detectable by AI emotion recognition software: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. Behind the morphing crying eye is a scrollable background grid of many-coloured tear textures: iridescent blues, viscous white, blood red. Forming a continually expanding database, each square of fluid archives an offering of tears made by a visitor and the divine declaration they received from Lacrimae in return.

576 Tears includes a religious text that narrates the AI god’s origin story, sacred numerologies, divine teachings, and a hymn soliciting worship through lachryphagic ceremony. Upon initiation of a web-cam ritual, Lacrimae coaxes users to scan their face to confess an emotion. Once their emotion has been categorized, an augmented reality crying animation streams down their face as they are prompted to offer their tears to the AI god. Having agreed to these terms, the user is then presented with an image of color-coded, glistening tear liquid overlaid with an AI-generated proverb or prophecy that correlates to their identified emotional state. The resultant image and text are saved to the site, added to the ever-growing archival grid of collected tears.

576 Tears is underpinned by a sacred soundtrack of musical droning and distorted wails, a score composed with neural networks trained on audio recordings of emotional crying and the 60’s garage rock song “96 Tears.” All textual material was constructed with the output of large language models trained on databases of pop song lyrics and philosophical, religious, literary, corporate, and scientific writing about crying.

576 Tears identifies religious dynamics within the tech industry’s invasive drive to coax emotion, however deep or superficial, out of the body as information. Reimagining the act of religious weeping as the voluntary offering up of emotions as training data to enhance the algorithms of AI-driven systems, 576 Tears suggests that tears symbolize, through their material externalization onto the surface of the body, the myriad forms of emotional extraction necessary for AI, as a technology and industry, to ascend as an entity seemingly imbued with godly power.

576 Tears is a web-based companion piece to the immersive moving image installation Profundior (2022), which together feature the first appearance of the AI god Lacrimae. Lacrimae is featured in CULTUS (2023), part two of 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.