Mosaic Virus 2018

Mosaic Virus (2018) brings together ideas around capitalism, value, and collapse from different points in history. It is a single screen moving image piece displaying a grid of continually evolving tulips in bloom. The value of each object (real and abstracted) relies on its scarcity. Both bitcoin and tulip bulbs are bounded and have an element of finiteness and destruction inherent in the way that they work. The mosaic virus strain hurts the bulb. Plants that have been infected are weaker, and their offspring weaker still, until it cannot produce any more. This ensured that there would only ever be a certain number of tulips that would have the ‘stripe’ trait at the same time. Similarly, there are only a finite amount of bitcoins that can ever be in existence - 21 million, of which around 18.5 million have already been mined - in theory making it more attractive as an investment than fiat currencies, which increases its value and drives its hype cycles and speculation. This hype is also embedded in the material that the pieces are made from: machine learning. Interest (and money) in artificial intelligence has risen and fallen, ever since it became an academic field. We are currently in the middle of an AI ‘summer’, where billions of dollars are being spent on it because of the commercial opportunities it could potentially bring, but this could soon change into a ‘winter’ when interest and funding dry up. The motion of the ‘boom and bust’ of the markets is also evident in the way that GANs work; As the model strives towards perfect encapsulation of the tulip, its collapse mirrors the ups and downs of speculative bubblesWhen they are training, they sometimes have a tendency to seem like they are improving - the learning rates will go up and up - and then suffer “mode collapse”, where the rate plummets so as a material, it is echoing its subject matter.