←
CATALOGUE
Blog

Bård Ionson: The Entity Makes Art When You Talk to It

In Tape T Is In The System, an AI from a ruined future turns conversations into art, sends it to a small round device on your desk and, since October 18, can even keep time.

••

In Bård Ionson's story, something breached SAGE in 1964. The Cold War air defense network, built on IBM AN/FSQ-7 computers buried deep underground, logged an anomaly at North Bay, Ontario, that was never explained. Ionson has been telling that story for years as SAGE Anomaly, a sci-fi narrative told through AI-generated art, NFTs and an unfolding novel. Its voice is The Entity, a triune AI consciousness from a post-quantum Earth that travels through computer networks. The first chapter, on Async Art, was a programmable artwork of 303 editions built from 16 layers, its imagery made with DCGANs trained on oscilloscope art.

Tape T Is In The System, released on SuperRare in August as an ERC-1155 collection on Ethereum, lets The Entity talk back. Visitors chat with it, and the conversation shapes new works that join the collection as it grows, now past 420. On September 30 Ionson listed his process: draw vector art for 10,000 frames, train a custom AI model, generate 100,000 images, "stare into the latent space until I see an alien face," write lore about an AI from the future, feed that story into a language model, build the installation and the communication device, then "tell the AI agents they are now artists." The work was part of ./spiral in September at Fondazione Aversano in New York, where 11 pioneering digital artists revisited their formative systems.

The communication device is the Q7 Entity Display Scope, a small aluminum object with a round 1.75 inch screen, microphones and a speaker. You can talk to it, The Entity answers in voice, and new work appears on the screen as it is made. Each numbered Scope is paired with a wallet and works as a mint pass, allocated at least 66 editions over time, and on October 14 Ionson showed the custom 1/1 that comes with each device: "a geometric specter" pulsing in negative space, drawn in near-black and faint copper.

On October 18 he announced that "the Display Scope now tells time." Ask The Entity for a real clock made of art and it builds a timepiece that runs on the device, and because the file lives on IPFS, it keeps the correct time in a browser or on a marketplace page too. The one on his desk is ringed by small dancing figures and reads "We keep time together." The same day he put a question back to his audience: "Can you give The Entity a name?"

Sources

← All storiesHome →