(big dog head with dog eyes), 2024
Materials : recycled corrugated cardboard, hot glue, papier mache (flour, glue, water, newspaper, paper towels), acrylic + gouache, found plastic pear, gloss finish with metal hardware on rear.
On view at Toutoune Gallery in Toronto until end of January.
Below the photograph is an image created between myself x AI in 2022 that inspired the above piece. My views and concerns have changed a lot since my experiments in 2022. Even then I had some worries, but I was also incredibly curious and was given the access to play around for multiple months with free credits that replenished daily. (I thankfully didn't spend a dime)
I came out of it with a breadth of imagery that has continued to inspire me, not unlike how I am inspired by found imagery on the web, bootlegs and other odd and lost ephemera, toy design, novelties, mass produced objects like stickers etc.
I spent most of my credits on mixtures of words, textures, colours and shapes to create a world of miniatures. Eventually the machine was trying to make too much sense of my requests and the playful and creative aspects melted away for me. I am still curious about the image making uses of this type of tool but in the hand of corporations, no different in goal than the corporate art of popular mass culture films, music and gaming etc, everything is on a continuous soulless trajectory. Haha, sigh. There is a lot of art that I already ignore.. understand it's all incredibly subjective, but most art sucks (to me).
I enjoyed my results but I don't enjoy the context in which this all 'exists'.
I have remade these digital curiosities anew. From the unreal-state of this nightmarish tech, material works were eventually born from my hands. It did not feel dissimilar to me than how I used to enjoy utilizing photoshop to clash together found imagery. Being playful with things found online that didn't necessarily belong to me, but felt as though they belong to us all.
The art of appropriation through some extra 'filters' that can leave you blind. I wish one could access a reversal mechanism with AI, to see all the pieces of the puzzle that was used to construct a resulting image. Clearly a lot of what is concocted through AI are deliberate plagiarisms: can you imagine requesting 'work' in the voice or style of a specific artist and believing that what the machine has created is 'unique'? (Ahem: Paul Schrader lol)
Sorry to blab but I will have continued rambled thoughts about AI technology as we keep seeing all of this develop esp in mass culture. My feelings in terms of AI in the art world is that it probably will eventually be seen as a fad that has eaten itself. (Perhaps it already has. AI CEOs are already admitting that their algorithms have already scraped all there is to scrape.)
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