Digital Residency Archive:
Rory Malone: November 14-21, 2022
During this residency, a new configuration of Rory Malone’s multi CG image 2021 work, ‘Loving Grace ?’ was displayed on our site.
Loving Grace ?, CG Images, 2021
This body of work uses computer generated images to challenge the notion of autonomous thought within digital manifestations of the future.
With the rise of text to image AIs like Dall-E 2, Midourney and Stable Diffusion one may believe that creative intent exists within the minds of these neural networks. The word promptcraft gives hints to the true inner workings of these algorithms. Prompt craft is the act of manufacturing the perfect sentence of tags,artists and adjectives to yield a perfect image from these systems. The prompt offers a suggestion of which areas of the large corpus of content that the AI holds to search though.
From Text to image networks to symphony writing algorithms they all use these huge datasets of human creative output to produce their results. The steps that the AI takes between input and result are still unknown to us. Described as 'an abstract multi-dimensional space containing feature values that we cannot interpret directly', this space acts as a black box in our understanding of thought within the machine.
To demonstrate this often blurred line between free action and human coding within the machine I examined the obscure notion of robot breath. While computer vision watches us through facial recognition systems and Google listens to our conversations for targeted advertising, it seems that the breath is the last refuge for the human that the machine cannot replicate.
Through the lens of robot breath the images of this project flip the reality of autonomous action within the machine back and forth between the miraculous and the coincidental.
Our digital residencies provide digital space and time for artists to exhibit work on our virtual platform.
Image and background image from Loving Grace ?, CG Images, 2021, courtesy of the artist.