«The Resemblance to the Speech Will Be Erased» is an installation and video essay about what remains when language fails. The entire film was shot from the body of the dog Aya, co-author and partner in migration and artistic practice. Working with this material, neural networks, and Stable Diffusion, Vasiliy Sumin explores three kinds of presence (animal, human, and machine) and the limits of what is possible between them.
The work unfolds in two visual modes. The first, monochrome and built from a single material, like in a video game, speaks of closeness and direct contact with a living being. The second, multicolored and heterogeneous, generated through prompting, expresses what could not be said directly. Stable Diffusion, trained on a subset of the LAION-5B dataset — billions of images and captions scraped from the web — returned the sought images through the stereotypes of this dataset, revealing not only what was suppressed, but the bias embedded in the machine's memory.
Finding himself in emigration, the artist turned to GPT-3.5 as one of the ways to make sense of the experience. The dialogue exposed another form of the same contradiction. The model operated through a Westernized logic that did not assume circumstances could differ so radically from the norm embedded in its data. Where contact was needed, it offered a protocol. Stable Diffusion, released to the public in August 2022, carried the same bias in visual form, and the images in this project were made within the following months.
The project was developed during the artist's residency at ZKM | Karlsruhe, organized by Peter Weibel. The installation, shown there in the summer of 2023 in a former weapons factory turned media art museum, unfolded at a height of 30–40 centimeters from the floor, from the dog's perspective. Among the objects were artifacts cast in epoxy resin: things that had lost their meaning in emigration, including Aya's own tag, worn before the move, with a phone number that can no longer be reached.
Special thanks to Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Goethe-Institut, Trust for Mutual Understanding, The Ocean Foundation, Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, and all our Friends.
