Archillect, the digital curator invented by crypto artist Murat Pak
Crypto artist Murat Pak invented a digital archive managed by an algorithm
Can an algorithm make aesthetic sense?
This is the question Murat Pak, Turkish designer, graphic designer and artist, asked himself before inventing Archillect.
Murat Pak is the digital artist chosen by Sotheby’s for his NFT market debut. “The Fungible Collection,” released on the Nifty Gateway platform.
Archillect (“Archive” + “Intellect”) is his most famous invention dating back to 2014 – Pak has been active in digital art for over two decades.
It is an algorithm capable of choosing and publishing suggestive images according to the aesthetic canons of the followers who follow it on the main social media – currently Archillect is present on Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, Facebook and Pinterest.
In fact, Archillect is capable of recording people’s tastes by taking into account the number of shares and likes on social networks.
The interesting aspect of Archillect lies in its autonomy.
It is true that it was the Pak artist who created the algorithm that makes the archive, but the code is independent and selects the images in the archives of Tumblr, Flickr and 500px basing the search on a few keywords and trying to optimize the choice according to the potential reach and sentiment of its audience.
Pak himself says: “Archillect’s curation process is completely automated. She is a living inspiration archive. She is a digital muse.” / “Archillect’s curation process is completely automated. She is a living inspiration archive. She is a digital muse.”
Another distinguishing feature of Archillect is its cold, almost metallic aesthetic.
None of the photos are accompanied by text. The curatorial tone is icy, the images are abstract and beautiful but almost devoid of any emotion. It is no coincidence that the dominant tones are grays, blues, blacks, almost monochrome and geometric lines, as if to externalize a cold and synthetic soul of a machine.
Archillect does not communicate intelligibly but only allusively: it refers to the hidden desires, the unexpressed dreams of the community.
Unlike a human being, his choice is not limited by available time or dependent on emotional factors.
He doesn’t post photos when he has time or when he wants to share a good or bad memory. It has no feeling and operates automatically. He chooses, evaluates, posts, learns and refines as he goes.
What about attribution?
The problem of sources and protection of authorship of images is very important to Archillect. There is a great effort in the research of different methods to identify the real source of the content and to safeguard the copyright.
These include Archillinks, a dedicated account/bot that finds original and alternative sources through web searches.
If on social networks such as Facebook and Instagram the link to sources is automatically inserted in the caption, on Twitter a separate account @Archilink has been created in which for each published image the links to the original source and to the derived ones are inserted.
How about you, are you ready to learn about Archillect?
