The
Contemporary
Remote
The contemporary remote arises from pervasive technology, mediated reality, and tech-enabled perception; a new kind of remoteness that can be found just as easily in a post-industrial inner-city backstreet or suburban living room as in a far-flug hinterland or wilderness︎︎︎
Original stock photo︎︎︎Embracing ‘wrongness’ as a chance operation.
"The Contemporary Remote" images were selected from a series of synthetic photographs generated for my artist talk "Embracing Wrongness", delivered as part of a creative AI workshop at the Virtual and Immersive Production Studio (VIP) in Nottingham in 2023. These images were produced by manipulating a stock image of a “nuclear family” using the Midjourney Discord server when text2image applications were still in their infancy. "Embracing Wrongness" explored generative AI not merely as a tool for image production, but as a conceptual framework for artistic practice, where the characteristic wrongnesses of text-to-image systems signify chance procedures within algorithmic remix.1 The traditional “cut/copy and paste” metaphor of analog/digital remix has been replaced by algorithmic “digestion” and “synthesis”, where autoencoders decode and synthesise outputs, potentially transforming how artists both conceptualise and produce their work.
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” and “synthesis” displaces the “cut and copy” and “paste” metaphors of classical remix.