A muscle -like man, only 20 years younger and better rest, eats hummus before another cut in belly dancers with large breasts, beautiful hips and full beards. This crazy sequence brings us to the choir: “The Trump Gaza, a bright bright/golden future, a brand new light/celebration and dance, the act becomes/Trump Gaza, No. 1.”
As the choir is repeated, we enter the “after” section of the spot. A child walks under a glittering avenue, holding an Mylar balloon in shape like the president’s head. The president himself talks to a younger woman in a casino. Money falls from the sky. The aforementioned gold statue is at the center of a busy roundabout and Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cocktail drink with their shirts from a pool. The whole thing is primary genetic AI is satisfactory hacky, more technically capable than most people could produce, but also disturb the patrick Bateman style, as if an automaton has decided what people like watching thousands of ads – that is exactly what happened.
Given how recently the genetic AI has developed, it is noteworthy how quickly its aesthetic characteristics have become recognizable: high contrast textures, noticeable diffuse lighting, forced shots in which people walk down the streets of the city or with taxolial openings. It is not what dreams look as much as a visual performance of a dream’s description, complete with mild failures of the permanence of the object and the feeling that we have seen everything before, though it did not seem like that.
Once this visual style became familiar, it seemed to become the dominant aesthetics of the Pro-Trump Internet. With the possible exception of business capital, the demographic that seems to have embraced AI with enthusiasm is the Maga Meme accounts, possibly because people who have rejected it louder – graphic designers, journalists, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, teachers – are liberals. In the reactionary logic of the class and Maga file, AI is good because the right people hate it.
This dynamic has created a culture of irony produced by a computer with strange features. It is not the constant irony of a Jonathan Swift or a Stephen Colbert, in which the public can rely on iron to say the opposite of what it means. Instead it is an unstable irony that leaves the true meaning of ambiguous or at least reasonably frustrated. President Trump himself created this approach “telling him as if it were” in a way that consistently ignores precision if not accuracy, speaking in excessive style that his followers understand that he is not literally but also the truth of the Gospel. The Trump Gaza video is ironic in this slippery meaning of the word. It is the irony of saying more than you mean (literally golden idol of Trump) or by saying what you mean in some way that no one could call serious (twice-twice belly dancers) or pay attention to your weak points as a gesture.
