“They look a bit like vaginas” said a friend who was inquiring about buying one of my prints recently. Yes! I wanted to exclaim. To make these prints, I put words from feminist theory through an AI text-to-image generator, and that’s what emerged – a bunch of different vaginal looking shapes and later, as the work developed, obstetric tool-like things that don’t exist outside the nonsensical world of the AI’s imagination. I certainly didn’t ask for vaginas, and the platform would not have allowed it anyway. It’s quite strict, rightly so, given the levels of violence and female degradation on the internet. My generations are more ambiguous, although the first one below may be the least so. But with many, when you turn the page upside down, they look like men’s faces. Neither aspect put my friend off. She purchased the print, and there are four left in the edition, so if you’re in the market … those ambiguous shapes can be yours too!
Shortly after that conversation, I listened to a podcast publicising The Sweeteness of Venus by Sarah Chadwick (2022). Chadwick laments the proliferation of male genitalia in the arts across centuries, compared to a veritable absence of their counterparts. If nothing else, my prints, ambiguous as they are, may make a minuscule dent in the historical archive. Women’s genitalia have famously been ignored in health and medicine, as well as art. Only relatively recently, now that women are more likely to work and be successful in both those fields, are we seeing and hearing more about the clitoris, which in the past, Chadiwck writes, was associated with the devil or else ignored entirely. Even today, I have noticed resistance to my hints of female anatomy. Other friends, not the one who bought the print, chimed, “You’re so mad. Sarah-Jane”. Mad to want to see the female form valued in some small way? Perhaps! Not because it’s a bad thing to want, but rather because, even today, it still seems somewhat distant and out of reach. Scandalous even, to some.
But, not only have I transgressed by creating objects that look like female genitalia, I have also used AI to do it. If one aspect fails to rile the viewer, then the other is bound to trigger enmity. I don’t want to get into the arguments for or against AI image-creation here. However, it’s not for nothing that I am playing with machine learning content and digital processes as I explore the body and procreation. We are at the birth of a new and exciting or frightening era, depending on your view. And throughout this visual investigation, I have been working with the word ‘lamella’; which Jaques Lacan used to describe an impossible to represent horror around the loss of immortality that occurs when an embryo forms (*see correction below) before, in his words, it becomes sexed. An alternative reading posited by Bracha Ettinger describes this moment in more life-affirming terms, suggesting cyclicality and regeneration. It seems that today, in this world of climate disaster and societal collapse, we humans should do all we can to pivot away from the death narratives that underpin our reality, and turn, if we can at all, towards more life affirming ones. And in the next era, which is being formed as we speak, we can either opt for the horror of Lacan or the generosity of Ettinger, as we face the loss of yesterday and look forward to tomorrow. And that is all I have been doing; trying my best to move away from the hysteria of a deathly culture, towards an existence that celebrates birth and regeneration, using the technology that promises to completely reconfigure who and what we are, how we see, and how we function.
I have moved away from vaginal looking creatures for now, but always return to the word lamella, even creating a custom generator using RunwayML, based on images from a 1960s book on obstetrics for nurses, which I have named Lamella.
Lacan and the post-Lacanian theorists, however, do not own Lamella. It is found across a range of sectors, and can mean different things, although it usually implies a membrane-like object or substance. For Lacan, that membrane was the horror that flies up onto your face and seems to suffocate. But in the 17th century, it was a harmless thin plate of metal. Nowadays, it is employed to describe the gills of a mushroom, a thin bit of fleshy bone, bits of gelatin, wood, leaf; even a blade in a camera’s lens. Perhaps for me and my AI experiments, it is the barely perceptible slice of time separating promise from reality, yesterday from the Now, or else both from tomorrow, and positivism from doom in relation to technology and our planet’s future. There is still much to explore and discover.
Despite the “oh you’re so mad” comments, I continue exploring these ideas, which must manifest as something tangible and worth exhibiting by the summer. In the meantime, I release elements which may or may not end up in the aforementioned project on my website and Instagram from time to time. Some of these are available to buy here. Watch this space for more news soon.
Correction: *the Lamella process occurs at birth, not when the embryo forms, but before the infant enters into the symbolic realm (which arguably takes places earlier nowadays since sonogram’s allow us to say “boy” or “girl” while the baby is still growing in its mothers belly). I’m not sure what happens to the image of loss of the membrane Lacan Drew his metaphor from under these circumstances.
Ref:
Chadwick, S. 2022 The Sweetness of Venus; A History of the Clitoris, Wild Pansy Press