At the time of writing (2023), I have been working on LAMELLA:// for several months. It began sometime during my first year on an MA at Central St. Martins and when AI image generators were released in 2022. I was fascinated by the general response, the excitement and vitriol, and in particular, the phrase ‘prompt-engineer’, conceived to describe people who write sentences to feed the machines. It’s so overblown but says a great deal more about our society than I suspect was intended. Having already created a body of work with an AI chatbot, I looked forward to seeing where the AI image generators might take me. And I believe my journey is quite different to others working with the same tools. For starters, I have little interest in creating images that look like someone else’s art. My earliest experiments did draw on the artist Heironymous Bosch but I always rejected anything that looked like an updated Garden of Earthly Delights. As such, I have created a custom generator on a platform called Runway ML, less well-known than Midjourney or DALL·E but with many more tools. The Situationist’s notion of détournement remains as critical as ever for me. And so the images fed into the generator come from 1960s book about obstetrics and are a central thread that runs throughout the project, which I will discuss in more detail elsewhere.
It took me a while to figure out what this project might be or how to share it with other people; in a book, a website, as an installation? I have, however, decided to continue in the same vein as with my earlier project why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/ and allow the project to spread its tentacles over a range of formats and media. But this time, to do so while it’s still forming. Various aspects of the project can be found at different places. Perhaps, I am influenced by Deleuze and Guattari’s thousand plateaus or the notion of a kind of digital fungi. Each space will have its own climate, boundaries, flavours.
The URL lamellae.org contains LAMELLA://, which aims to be a depository for curated manifestations that emerge from my inquiry, including fragments of speculative fictions, possibly other people’s contributions too, should that occur. Instagram hosts fragments that might evolve and develop into something more, and which are sometimes discussed with people within my social media sphere, or else they’ll simply recede like old thoughts. And here, I will write about books I’ve read, plans, ideas, questions, interactions with other artists, anything that relates to this body of work, which I might add, may never be fully resolved (a hint of which you witness here in the obvious edits).
Do get in touch if you have something to contribute or any comments. I can be reached using info@sarahjanefield.co.uk