How did we get here? (part 1)

I think that I need to go back to go forward with this journal. I am going to write a post (or more likely two or three) reviewing what I have been up to over the last few months. I am conscious that in moments like the present where I have a lot going on, I can have a tendency to go into a ‘making/doing’ mode which can be very productive but not always as critically engaged as I might like. I think that the journal could help with this.

I am currently making a body of work that makes use of generative Ai as part of the process. My interest in Ai dates back to the middle of last year. Prior to this I had used Chat GPT to help draft a few bits of text but not much more than that. I was making a series of paintings using imagery derived from films that I had made on the streets of Edinburgh. When I work like this, I am always concerned about the ethics of making recognisable pictures of people who have not given their permission. In the past I have used various tactics to mitigate this and one of my fallbacks has been to photoshop in faces from stock imagery. It was whilst doing this routine task that I noticed that Photoshop was offering the option of editing my images using Ai. I wondered if this might be a quicker way of editing my images and gave it a go. The results were hilarious and utterly useless; good results involved heads being replaced with tiny, pea-heads or the heads from show room dummies, bad results were like John Carpenter’s worst nightmares. Ok, I thought, maybe there’s a way to go with this technology and I went back to cutting and pasting faces from Shutterstock.

That exhibition came and went, and a couple of months later I was beginning to think about what I might do next. There are a number of themes in my work that ebb and flow and whilst I view my practice as being in its early stages I can already see a pattern emerging whereby, I often go back to things that I had previously thought myself to be done with. I think that this is, to some extent, a consequence of some habits that I formed whilst at college and then art school which I would now like to challenge. Both institutions encouraged/ required me to think about my work in discrete units and this, combined with the constant need to show something new, meant that I got into the habit of moving on from things that I am interested in before they are necessarily exhausted.

I was looking at some films that I made in 2022 when I was making the work for my Degree Show. There was an image that I was particularly taken with at the time but which I decided that I couldn’t use for the aforementioned ethical reasons. The image is quotidian; a young couple walking together under the motorway. The work that I was making at the time was about the idea of moving through a space and their image would have fitted into the sequence of paintings nicely. Looking at the picture again made me think about the painting that was never made. This in turn led me to think about all the lost moments that I might have wanted to make into work; the things that I didn’t record or perhaps even notice at the time. 

My work has been exploring ideas about memory and remembering for a while. I was very influenced as an undergrad by a book called Empty Moments by a Film Studies scholar called Leo Charney. He postulates that a defining quality of modernity is an inability to find a stable version of the present, a state he refers to as ‘drift’. This idea that we can never forget that we are fractionally out of sync with the moment and so are, therefore, required to live in our memories, resonates with me and has led me to read quite a lot about the science of memory. 

All of this led me back to Ai. Ok I thought, my first experience of image generating Ai was pretty underwhelming but also you would need to be living under a stone not to be aware of the loud claims being made for the capabilities of these machines. Perhaps I was just using the wrong one? Could I use Ai to recreate ‘lost moments’. Could I use Ai to recreate a new version of the young couple walking under the motorway? And if I could then what would be the point?