The global chip shortage during the COVID-19 pandemic brought semiconductor production into focus, sparking accelerated efforts to meet the surging demand for digital infrastructure. This phenomenon not only expanded AI capabilities but also introduced unexpected computational artifacts.
One such artifact is the word “arafed”, a term absent from any dictionary yet mysteriously appears across contexts from image prompts to Amazon product descriptions. Such unintended linguistic artifacts, born from transformer-based AI models, exemplify how digital artifacts emerge into realities with which we cohabitate.
The talk investigates how supply-chains break and AI-words spread from an artistic research perspective. Mapping both the abstract landscapes of embedding spaces, that are filled with emergent words and images, and the tangible, geopolitical realities of global semiconductor supply chains.