Cybernetic Futures
Online Art Exhibitions
AI_ID Unbound Selves
B Some-One II
By Marcel Moonen
Artist Statement
by Marcel Moonen
B Some-One II
In a world so strange and absurd,
where the norms of society are blurred.
There comes a demand, so unique and bold,
for humanity's right to see in different colors, untold.
Gone are the days of plain old yellow, for we want to express ourselves in a new way, mellow.
AfterMichaelMandiberg
2024
By
Garrett Lynch IRL
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An AI reimagining of Michael Mandiberg's appropriated photographs of Sherrie Levine's appropriated photographs of Walker Evans' photographs.
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Garrett Lynch IRL Michael Mandiberg
Artist Statement
by
Garrett Lynch IRL
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AfterMichaelMandiberg (2024) is a series of works reimagining appropriation in contemporary art within the context of AI. The works appropriate AfterSherrieLevine, itself an act of appropriation by Michael Mandiberg, that digitised and put online copies of Sherrie Levine’s appropriation, rephotographed photographs from an exhibition catalog of Walker Evans’ photographs of the Burroughs family, sharecroppers in 1930s Depression era Alabama in the US, and recreates them with AI.
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While Levine’s act of appropriation employed mechanical reproduction, similar to that described by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, to produce one new copy of Evans photographs and Mandiberg’s act of appropriation employed digital reproduction, similar to that described by Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media, to allow an online audience to copy, paste and print endlessly Levine’s rephotographed photographs, AfterMichaelMandiberg creates new versions of Mandiberg’s copies. These new, or alternative, versions depict different people and slightly distinct scenes that have an uncanny similarity to Evans original photographs.
In doing so the versions, in a sense fourth generation versions of Evans photographs, allude to the possible introduction of noise or feedback and changes that have occurred as a result. The introduction of noise, originally initiated by Mandiberg moving them from an artefact to information, ‘real’ to ‘virtual’, and now moved in AfterMichaelMandiberg from information to fiction, ‘virtual’ to possible, enables a reimagining of the history originally portrayed by Evans. As such, AfterMichaelMandiberg is all at once a comment on originality and authenticity of art in an era of AI; plagiarism of concept; copying, remixing and degradation of material; yet employs art’s long-established tradition of titling works as being ‘after’, in the style of, alongside ideas of versioning in software applied to the creation of art.
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Similar to Mandiberg’s AfterSherrieLevine, online audiences are invited to copy, paste and print the series of AI photographs in AfterMichaelMandiberg, this time through the social media platform Pinterest known for its extensive use of AI generated and curated visual content. However, the code employed in the creation of the series of works is also provided, enabling an online audience to interactively generate their own versions of the photographs, thereby potentially creating endless versions and endless alternative histories.
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AfterMichaelMandiberg was generated with AI (Flux 2.0 in ComfyUI) using the photos on Michael Mandiberg's website as input (image-to-image generation). If you compare my photos with his appropriated photos you'll see that the people are not the same - my photos are more than appropriated photos, they fall somewhere between appropriation/copies/re-enactement.
Garrett Lynch IRL Michael Mandiberg
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Garrett Lynch IRL Michael Mandiberg
I’m not Garrett Lynch IRL
– DoppelGANger Portraits
Artist Statement
by Garrett Lynch IRL
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I’m not Garrett Lynch IRL – DoppelGANger Portraits is a series of twenty-five neural network and generative adversarial network (GAN) portraits.
The series takes advantage of multimodal neuron behaviour within neural networks that allow the ability to respond to clusters of abstract concepts presented as photographs, sketches or text. Employing the text prompt “I’m Garrett Lynch IRL” to generate each portrait, the artist’s name is recognised by a neural network as being male but is not absolutely matched with visual depictions of the artist. The neural network then instructs a GAN to generate what it is certain of, to create portraits of a male, and as a fallback to render the artist’s name, wholly or in part, as text within the portraits. The resulting portraits, imagined and created as a
result of artificial intelligence networks, are depictions of ‘virtual’ beings originated in a ‘virtual’ space. They are the Other, numerous Others, not the artist Garrett Lynch IRL (either Irish or in real life) yet each is labelled with the artist’s name suggesting all at once an ambiguous relationship to him that lies somewhere between avatar, clone, offspring and doppelganger.
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