AI Collaborations

This project uses commercially available AI technology as the basis of an aleatory technique, recalling Surrealist games of chance. The process begins with gathering and curating a hoard of digital images from a wide range of sources online and otherwise. This compost heap of visuals becomes fodder for the AI, which interprets them and trains itself to produce images In their style. I then select from the results and respond with images of my own to form diptychs.

My work often gravitates to themes of memory, and how memories of events and dreams are synthesized into the visual medium. I became interested in artificial intelligence because of how machine learning algorithms mimic the unconscious mind, synthesizing composite images from what they “experience”. I also became interested in how they seem to mirror the nature of creativity in our era of unprecedented media saturation, and call into question ideas of authorship and originality.

AI technology has become insinuated in every corner of our lives in service of capitalism in increasingly sinister and degrading ways. This proliferation of technology has to meet the continuous demand for both novel and familiar content, and rote production also turns energy into waste material. The algorithm processes and recontextualizes fragments of cultural and commercial detritus and regurgitates a product that is both familiar and alien. This project seeks to commandeer these tools to my own ends and reclaim/repurpose both the waste material and the means through which it is produced to suggest the possibility of an alternative relationship to technology.