If my post on language (1st March) refused questions, this one is all about questions. And answers! It is the second part of a joint blog published in collaboration with friend and fellow photographer/artist Catherine Banks, which focuses on the release of deep learning image-generation platforms such as Midjourney. Catherine’s work is often situated within domesticated and historical landscapes, but she also experiments with the digital. Catherine took to Midjourney immediately, but is concerned about the prosaic way it is often used, along with the ethical conundrums it raises around copyright. The following is an edited version of our email discussion. Catherine’s questions to me and my answers will be published in due course and linked here thereafter.
- In an earlier module, you made a project using a proprietary ‘virtual’ world, SIM City, and you experimented with AI/ML generated images when they were made accessible to everyone last year. Yet, you state you are now using AI for a reason that is unusual for you. Am I right to be sensing an ambivalence about your use of AI? If so, what is that about? General enmity in the ether, perhaps? Or something else?
I’m still a member of Second Life which I joined whilst Studying Digital Image and Culture [with the Open College of Arts – OCA]. In effect, I became a virtual auto-ethnographer in adopting the role of a digital settler. I created short videos of time spent there and also kept a separate blog as my avatar. I’ve only been back to Second Life once since then due to pressures of ongoing coursework and also my continuing conscious incompetence in respect of the use of technology.
My current ambivalence is more complex. I’ve become bored with photography yet don’t view myself as someone who can draw, paint or play music etc. I’m interested in creating videos yet, again, feel held back by my lack of expertise in creating more complex videos. Narrative/story-telling is important to me but text isn’t enough and I usually aim for text and image to be in dialogue. The idea of using an AI image generator is fascinating because the images result from my own words. I think though that, at present, they act more as illustration to the story I want to tell (hence my ambivalence) although, at the same time seeing the images produced has given me new ideas on how to progress my project. This fits with an article in The Register – an interview by Thomas Claburn (2022) with David Holz who co-founded Leap Motion and then went on to create Midjourney. Holz sees AI tools as making artists better at what they do. He admits he thinks the world needs more beauty but doesn’t want Midjourney to be a source of fake photos of the world so they do bias away from photos – a great discussion topic! He also recognises concerns about the use of AI.
Follow up comments/questions – I completely get the frustration with photography. Perhaps we need a separate discussion for that! Your comment, “and also my continuing conscious incompetence in respect of the use of technology” makes me think about how I can also find technology awkward and difficult although I am relatively competent with everyday tech. But when I’m setting up installs, or wanting to learn new programmes, I become horribly frustrated. It reminds me of being a child in maths class – utterly bewildered and hopeless! Do you think not being ‘digital natives’ (for want of a better term) is what makes us so interested and eager to explore these landscapes and processes? Are we merely trying to get in with ‘the youth’? Perhaps it’s that and something deeper too?
The concern around ownership and usage obviously needs addressing. However, I have long been interested in the practice of appropriation and the Situationists’ détournement, as discussed in your questions (to be published separately). I don’t see the use of AI images which have learned from artists as being all that different from anyone else’s way of learning. Indeed, art tutors are constantly suggesting names to learn from. Ideally, what follows is a degree of mediation, unless one is making a point like the Pictures Generation were (which is a form of mediation in itself). At the moment, many people using AI are not mediating at all, merely copying. I hope that by using the custom generator provided by Runway ML, I overcome some of this (more experienced developers bring the whole system onto their huge computers and do it that way). But it’s also important to note that I’m not trying to represent something in the world. Rather, I’m trying to embark on a project that continually feeds on itself, folds into itself, and then gives birth (excuse the pun) to something new. I want it to be inquiry “into the means of its own production” (Wark, 2015; 165). I also often do a reverse image search, which should tell me if something is too close to a living artist’s work, which I don’t want anyway.
- Ben Davis writes in Art in the After Culture, Ch. 4 AI Aesthetics and Capitalism, “Faced with examples of AI art-making, the critical impulse is either to fall back into metaphysical assumptions about the ineffably unique, inviolably human qualities of “real” creativity or to nitpick each new creation’s failures as “proving” that AI will never master “real” art. ” Both these responses seem banal and somewhat pointless to me, but I am generally quite intolerant! Can you describe how you feel about the manifestations that emerge from your interactions with AI image generators with Davis’ sentence in mind?
That’s a difficult one. I think there are endless variations of creative practice and hope I’m open-minded on the whole. Maybe nothing at all is entirely new if you actually trace right back. Of course, now I’m answering the question I’m starting to think about ‘copying’ – if it’s the beginning of a creative project which develops then that’s a tool. Even tracing can help someone understand about form, structure and composition. If it’s something like painting by numbers then that might not be so – depends perhaps on how much is learned about colour. I have a Google document list (very long) of the artists used in the Midjourney sets. I hardly recognised any of them which, perhaps, isn’t surprising but they also didn’t come up in a web search. See also my answer to Q.1. Holz does recognise copyright issues and provides his own rationale which makes sense.
Your answer makes me think of the immense privilege associated with art, and how that is sometimes overlooked and under-appreciated, and how new processes open up possibilities for more people. And also about the hero artist and how that is a product of individualism, which may (fingers crossed!) have had its day.
- Your work is focused on nature, preserving it, exploring mankind’s place in it. [Righty so, as this is THE concern of our times.] Lately, I have become increasingly sceptical of the way we, especially artists, talk about nature, positing it as something out there, separate from us, fetishised. We, and all our awfulness – including the desire to consume and metabolise the environment – are part of nature. Nature itself is incredibly violent. We’re destructive. It’s in our natures! Of course, we must find ways to be more responsible, but I wonder if there is a way to talk about nature without fetishising it, without extracting ourselves and culture. And if so, does AI provide us with a tool to do so [because it is built with code which has such a high degree of fluidity]? (I attached an essay by Brent J Crosson (2021: p13) which explores the “story of western modernity as the separation of nature and culture that has led to unprecedented environmental catastrophe”).
Agree with you about finding a way to talk about nature without fetishising it and the violence of man. Again, this is complex and we could discuss for a long time. The summary of Biophilia goes a little way to explaining my thoughts but it’s deeper than that for me but difficult to explain. I believe that everything not created by man’s intelligence etc is part of a network of ‘being’ sharing the same kinds of creation patterning – e.g. snowflakes, rings on trees, fingerprint whorls – which provides infinite variety. [Comment: Yes, I agree. But what you are talking about is the reduction of everything we know in the universe into information, to code. And some people are unhappy about that, since they believe it removes immanence entirely. I also suspect there those who see it as over-scientification, a view that can inadvertently support destructive ideologies, such as the rejection of climate-science.]
I do think that AI provides a metaphorical tool but needs to be used sparingly because the shock of the novelty wears off if used too often. An example is Avatar (motion based on human motion) which I know touched many people. Does version 2 have the same effect I’m wondering. [I wonder if you feel the same about writing? I know you yourself have grown tired of photography, as have I. But it’s as popular as ever, perhaps even more so.]
Time Traveller [a piece of writing by Catherine – see previous blog] is partly based around my anxiety that a concrete river will overwhelm the village where I live and I’m still not satisfied with the AI images I’m producing for this.
- I asked you to use some of my writing as a prompt for your own AI generations – how did this feel? Did you find it useful, did you feel indifferent? An AI generator is already a challenge to the notion of a fixed self, as well as modern sensibilities around ownership. Is using language that emerged from my experiments a step too far? If you are OK with me doing so, may I use some of your words, perhaps from the Time Traveller document in my Lamella project?
I was really interested to use some of your writings as a prompt to see if the AI generator came up with something similar or not, which it didn’t. But then I don’t know exactly how you worded the phrases, what kind of images you rejected or how much you’ve worked on the images retained. I’m looking forward to seeing what you produce from my own words and don’t feel at all ‘precious’ about them as I know you’re strong on ethical practice. Regarding fixed self, I think traits become ‘character’ and some people have characters that are more fixed whilst others are more fluid. There’s a very wide range and instability can be dangerous as I’ve learned from my own work experience.
I agree, an unstable self can be very dangerous. And we’re living through an extremely unstable time, supported by unstable structures (a world built around and upon and through fluid code). When we spoke, I had not had the chance to use your words yet. But I did shortly afterwards and love a couple of them. I recall someone saying in a Youtube video (2022), the artists of the future will be poets, people who can write, which sort of goes against the trend of emojis and text-speak. That came across while using your words with my lamella custom image-generator. I keep seeing the word poetics in various critical theory books, from Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi to McKenzie Wark. Working with your words made something of that very clear to me.
- Finally, can you pinpoint and discuss any specific philosophies that underlie your experiments/process?
I did a fair bit of reading for the Second Life project. How Plato’s allegory of the Cave links with J. Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. Also Plato’s notions of truth as external and perfect versus Aristotle’s view that truths should be searched for within the essence of things. I looked at the concept of the ‘Uncanny Valley’ as well, plus Freud’s writing on the uncanny.
Time Traveller arose from my tutor’s feedback that there was too much history in my dissertation on ‘What Makes a Village’. Whilst I accepted that to some extent, I do think that that every village is different and it’s their history that contributes to this. The writing of Doreen Massey was very influential to my thinking in her writing of space as a ‘heterogeneity of practices and processes rather than a discrete multiplicity of inter things’ (D. Massey 2005:107) so that space is always under construction and history is being made now. Other writers have also referred to the inter-relationship of history and the continuous existence of temporality – comparing it to a ‘flat; handkerchief when crumpled inside a pocket (Serres, M & Latour, B. 1995). Deleuze also wrote on the alveolar theory of space and the way in which interactions between fullness and emptiness are characterised by flows and waves and are always fluid. His answer was a chart which gathers superimposed charts. I wanted to create something different – an ‘uncanny’ version of the history of the village and the use of AI image generation seemed very appropriate and I used text from these writers to generate images.
This conversation was triggered by comments and questions that Catherine left on my blog in an earlier post and her unfailing curiosity and openness. I have been left with even more questions and energy to continue investigating. Thank you, Catherine, for your engagement!
Refs:
Banks, CA. (2021) Time Traveller.
Berardi, F. (2017) Futurability: the age of impotence and the horizon of possibility. London ; Brooklyn: Verso.
Banks, C. (2018) Catherine Banks Digital Image and Culture, Digital Image and Culture. Available at: https://catherinebanksdiac.wordpress.com/ (Accessed: 15 March 2023).
Banks, C. (2023) C A Banks Level 3 Study Blog, C A Banks Level 3 Study Blog. Available at: https://cabankslevel3.com/ (Accessed: 15 March 2023).
Crosson, J.B. (2021) ‘Humanism and Enlightenment’, in Crosson, J. B., The Oxford Handbook of Humanism. Edited by A. B. Pinn. Oxford University Press, pp. 175–205. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190921538.013.33.
Claburn, T. (2022) Holz, founder of AI art service Midjourney, on future images. Available at: https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/david_holz_midjourney/ (Accessed: 13 March 2023).
Davis, B. (2022) Art in the After-Culture Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy. La Vergne: Haymarket Books.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2013) A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. 1. paperback ed. London: Bloomsbury (Bloomsbury revelations series).
Fitpatrick and Eastman (1960) Zabriskie’s Obstetrics for Nurses. Philadelphia/Montreal: Lippincott.
Frye, D. (2018) The Biophilia Effect: Exploring the Healing Power of Nature | Psychology Today. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/201801/the-biophilia-effect-exploring-the-healing-power-nature (Accessed: 13 March 2023).
Massey, D. for space. (2005) London: Sage Publications
Serres, M and Latour, B. ((1995) Conversations on Science, Culture and Time. University of Michigan Press
Wark, M. (2016) Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London New York, NY: Verso.
Will Artificial Intelligence End Human Creativity? (2022). YouTube: Design Theory. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqamdXxdfSA (Accessed: 29 August 2022).