Cyborg TAROT

Duration: Approximately 3 minutes.
Webcam optional but recommended.
Play loud in an appropriate context.
TL;DR - Non-linear speculation of posthuman disconnection through biological/technological feedback.

Cyborg T.A.R.O.T. is an android revealing how bodies and technical devices amplify, contaminate, and alter one another. The experience seeks to provoke reflection through maximalist combinatorics, sensory saturation, and a feedback loop between algorithmic generative AI models and the human engaging in the experience. Ultimately, this project aims to deepen the speculative potentials of tarot as described by the Italian technoccult organization Gruppo di Nun: "Tarot makes manifest the idea that the cosmos is a cybernetic organism in a continuous process of recombination."

The downloadable version is an adaptation of the software behind the MK3 physical installation developed during an art residency at Sporobole, located in Sherbrooke, QC.  MK4 will include facial recognition and biofeedback.

Cyborg T.A.R.O.T. is the central artifact developed for my PhD research at the Faculty of Communication of UQAM. The current working title of the thesis is "To Conspire with the Unintelligible: Towards Noisy Game Creation." This research investigates noise as a philosophical concept beyond its acoustic sense, exploring its applications not only in artistic practice but also in critically engaging with innovation, media definitions, and anthropocentrism. The project interrogates how one might work with noise to generate experiences that are cognitively disruptive—beyond intelligibility.

As an epistemic object, Cyborg T.A.R.O.T. is a site for testing conflicting epistemological and ontological noise theories. It engages with contrasting analytical frameworks, such as those advanced by Inigo Wilkins in opposition to Gilles Deleuze. The project draws from the creative tactics of industrial culture—exemplified by artists such as Genesis P-Orridge,  Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, and Mark Pauline —employing improvisation, collage, technological hijacking, and shock as strategies to explore the affordances of generative AI and video game engines. This aesthetic orientation is further underpinned by the noise of speculative posthumanism, which informs the project's narrative dimension and theoretical foundation.

Through this process, the work examines how these tactics, historically associated with analog and subversive cultural practices, can be recontextualized within contemporary computational environments, notably game design. This research-creation approach is grounded in rigorous documentation, facilitating an iterative feedback loop between theoretical inquiry and creative experimentation. Ultimately, the project seeks to complexify the understanding of research-creation itself by demonstrating that it is inherently noisy—marked by epistemological ruptures, indeterminacies, and disruptions that resist stable categorization.