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On the Concept of History (in Foundation Models)
Offert, Fabian (2023) , S. 121-134
What is the concept of history inherent in contemporary models of visual culture like cLIP and DALL·E 2? This essay argues that, counter to the corporate interests behind such models, any understanding of history facilitated by them must be heavily politicized. This, the essay contends, is a result of a signif- icant technical dependency on traditional forms of (re-)mediation. Polemically, for cLIP and cLIP-dependent generative models, the recent past is literally black and white, and the distant past is actually made of marble. Moreover, proprie- tary models like DALL·E 2 are intentionally cut off from the historical record in multiple ways as they are supposed to remain politically neutral and culturally agnostic. One of the many consequences is a (visual) world in which, for instance, fascism can never return because it is, paradoxically at the same time, censored (we cannot talk about it), remediated (it is safely confined to a black-and-white media prison), and erased (from the historical record).