Christopher Kulendran Thomas
Peace Core

Peace Core, Christopher Kulendran Thomas in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann

A pioneer of post-AI art, Christopher Kulendran Thomas has been using Artificial Intelligence technologies over the last decade to make genre-defying work that examines the foundational fictions of Western individualism. For this commission, he employs the editing style of early ‘corecore’ videos on TikTok, where arbitrary video and music is combined for emotional affect, projecting meaning into meaninglessness. But the footage featured in Peace Core is anything but meaningless – it is from a morning in America that is carved into collective memory: September 11, 2001. 

In this 24-channel video work, the television footage is continually algorithmically auto-edited into a hypnotic meditation, synchronised with an ever-evolving soundtrack composed using AI tools that keep remixing the soundtracks that were broadcast that morning. The geopolitical shifts and repercussions of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ that erupted were felt across the globe including in Tamil Eelam – Kulendran Thomas’s family homelands – and which continue to be felt in independence movements around the world today. 

Bathing in the warm light of this historical singularity Peace Core draws overlooked connections between the cultural legacies of the West and the violence that has followed in its wake, straddling three event horizons – one that was seen in real time at the twilight of the broadcast era; another that occurred in its geopolitical aftermath, but went largely unreported for years; and a third that we face now at the dawn of a technological convergence in the era of artificial intelligence.