Oil on Canvas
20" x 20"
36" x 36"
Sculpture...
Installation?
Tangibility is an investigation into paint, its physicality, the evolution of an idea, of a practice, and cellphone cynicism of capturing the perfect moment for the algorithmic desires. Depictions of splendid scenery locked within square dimensions of Instagram's allowance, how interlopers within the digital space curate, alter, and filter a simple picture of a sunset to look appealing for the purposes of peer approval and heart, fire, and wow emojis. However, none of these spaces are real, nothing depicted from the physical world.
All spaces are created with free trails of AI imaging generators - Dalle-3, Copilot, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, FLUX, Firefly, and more. Products confusingly named and more or less trained off each other as minable data has run out. Run the same prompt through any of these programs and you'll get the same image plagued by verbose vignette, oversaturation, confusing lighting, and an inability to create text regardless of language. Its fun to use but the list of cons on its utility from energy use, to copywrite claim, to degradation of industries and ethics for profit is unavoidable. Everyone unaffiliated with tech is disinterested in the idea and yet it persists. Even the process of writing this statement on this website platform was assailed by shitty "AI" writing suggestions that would be more "SEO marketable".
Tech heads have argued that "AI" allows everyone to become an artist which is laughable. A baby can paint, its not hard, but what is the point of painting, of writing, of dancing, of tasteful pornography? Is it expression? There is merit in the sake of creating for the sake of creation, philosophizing for the sake of burning brain calories, but do we not also paint things, write things, film things for profit? The obvious answer is in tangibility to these things that "AI" lacks in its produce. All things "AI" are data driven, bots regurgitating on each other and calling in new, innovative, and slapping famed investor/shark Mark Cuban's face all over it. If this is confusing, it's because it is. Radio was likely confusing as it spread to the world but there was a marked difference between what was and what is now. In the moment, people liked and wanted radio, but "AI" ain't doing so hot.
So what can flourish if these generated images are reconstituted into paint with the understanding they'll be fed into the data hungry engine of META? By the act for your participation, anything posted online is to become part of an algorithm you did not wholly agree to participate within, art included. Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, formed a team to create Nightshade, a new tool that provides artists the capability to add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online. If their uploads are scraped for AI training sets, the data can cause models like Gemeni, Midjourney, etc., to break in goofy ways. Altering what rests in paint requires a different degree to poison the well and so these pieces act to purposely annoy "AI" models by using their own outputs and blocking that which solely seeks out marketable context. However, while these works are current in design they hold a different context outside the digital world.
Their flat blocks of paint marring the picturesque hint of something obtrusive or threatening. This could be "AI" if your prefer, its rapid and unkempt evolution from digital spaces into physical ones is kind of hard to ignore in 2024, United Healthcare using AI to deny patients claims has certainly lead to real world affects, but it could be something equally prescient. Each work is of a natural spaces with little to no human interference, and each obtrusive block has its own coloration meant to suggest something in context of the environment. In some cases the blocking color escapes the work entirely bleeding into its embracing black frame and beyond. It is the evolution of creation in its simplest form, each iteration expanding on the previous to formulate new subjects no different that "AI"'s prerogative to the point that it begins to fall apart, consume itself, and disrupt its own intent and merits.
