Nuclear Family, a stock photograph manipulated in Midjourney.︎︎︎︎︎︎
Nuclear Family
The Nuclear Family images were generated for my artist talk Embracing Wrongness, as part of a creative AI workshop at the Virtual and Immersive Production Studio (VIP) in Nottingham (Dec-2023). The presentation discussed how generative AI technology can be regarded not just as an instrument for synthetic image creation, but as a conceptual framework for an artwork, where the current traits or ‘wrongnesses’ of text2image generators signify chance operations characteristic of algorithmic remix.1
FINGERring above by Nadja Buttendorf︎︎︎
Original stock photo.︎︎︎
1 In The Routledge Handbook of Remix Studies and Digital Humanities (2021), Steve F. Anderson has acknowledged that there is something that can be thought of as a classical age of (analog and digital) remix, predicated on discrete, remixable elements of visual and written culture. We are now in what Anderson refers to as “an algorithmic period of remix”, whereby a machine learning algorithm “digests” salient characteristics from an original training set with the potential to generate something ‘new’ based on those characteristics. Algorithmic remix is consistent with the logic of remix as long as it is understood that “digestion” displaces the “cut and copy” metaphor of classical remix.