These small scale photos were created in 2021/22 during the first wave of image generators that appeared on the web (DALL-E / Craiyon), which were easily accessible and free to use. Akin to the arrival of cheap, low cost, (sometimes disposable) cameras, such as the Kodak Brownie (released in 1900), this new form of image making, in which text prompts were the (conceptual) iris and shutter, allowed amateur users to experiment with AI imagery. This period of initial experimentation by the public not only helped train these first neural networks but it also provided users with the novelty of image creation from text prompts.

The rise of generative AI solutions available to the general public in the initial rush-to-market of companies flexing their bespoke algorithms created an unprecedented interest in this new form of imaging. Akin to the first wave(s) of both photographic and then filmic forms, these image generators were trained on the initial data sets of both acquired and pirated materials, and as such were much less polished and seamless than the platforms which soon followed and have since become powerfully uncanny in their renderings.

Hallmarks of early AI image generation were wonky limbs and hands with distorted and/or missing fingers (or indeed too many) and text which looked like the glyphs of some lost language. These aberrations were the signs of an emerging visual medium in its infancy, and much like the Daguerreotypes (and subsequently, polaroids) before them, these images speak to the technical origins of their becoming, framed and situated in a time scale with its own unique aesthetic manifestations.

The images from this series are the product of this early use and implementation of AI for the general public and the works are a slice of (anthropocentric) time that cannot be replicated and as such are unique artifacts of an age already past, never to be repeated, one-of-a-kind cyphers of a future being (still) written.

The images below are a sampling of the works from the project. These 65 images (5" x 5" / 12.7 x 12.7cm each) are printed and mounted on white aluminum behind acrylic with custom mounting brackets. (*The pixellation is invisible/reduced in the physical prints)