Forking Room 2023 took place from Thursday, May 11 to Thursday, May 18, 2023, with the theme "Adrenaline Prompt.”
 
"Humans grow linearly, companies grow exponentially." As this startup review has never been more true, GPT-3 in 2020, DALL-E in 2021, DALL-E2 and ChatGPT in 2022, and GPT-4 in 2023 were announced. With the advent of prompt-based artificial intelligence, generative media, synthetic media, and large generative models, many have focused on mechanisms, phenomena, and effects. Forking Room 2023 Adrenaline Prompt sought to read the interpolation of potential spaces beyond the phenomena and confront the synthetic ecosystem we face with 25 teams/30 artists.

​

This year, the participating artists in Forking Room were all researchers and zine makers, experimenting in different ways with the synthetic outputs that large artificial intelligence models produce in unlimited combinations, much like adrenaline, which causes immediate changes in the body under certain stimulating circumstances. The results of their experiments were organized in the form of zines and placed in the exhibition, and we collected research zines from last year and this year with referential readings next to them. Those who have experienced or witnessed prompted adrenaline metaphorically created an infoshop at the exhibition venue.  We invited the audience to explore the infoshop, which at first glance may seem like a disparate collection of information but is inspiring to navigate between. At the infoshop, full of generative outputs, the audience witnessed a wide range of approaches, from wild but persistent experiments to attempts to fill in the context of the prompt with a combination of human intellect.

​

Looking back, Forking Room 2022: The Canary in the Synthetisphere focused on generative neural networks and envisioned a world where synthesis outpaced cognition. After the advent of deep fake, we imagined the concept of real fake which are predictable future or things that are more real than real. But less than a year later, we questioned if we were getting closer to the concept of a pre-given fake. We used this term to refer to a fake that is not yet a fake, but is waiting a priori in the potential space of a large artificial intelligence, and that it might be an adrenaline prompt that triggers it. The pre-given fake captures the essential question of what is a fake, the attempt to point out the blueness that the prompt creates, and all the confusion and consequences from it. We documented this microcosmic yet giant shift that may shift our epistemology from a critical lens that goes beyond the analysis of phenomena and usage. The transformation of perception that comes with large generative models and their outputs may be the adrenaline pumping through the cracks in our superficiality. The real and the pre-given fake are already inadvertently bumping into each other, penetrating the Synthetisphere.