Many years ago I worked as a photoshop artist at a big photography studio owned by a giant corporation in Manhattan. They wanted to expand the studio business into compositing and digital effects, so they had me create a bunch of portfolio pieces to show their clients.
One idea I had was to create an elaborate "Greek Mythology" scene incorporating ruined temples and magical creatures along with scantily clad models (this being the commercial art world, no consideration was given to justifying the sexual politics involved).
We staged a number of shoots for the project using professional models and elaborate props, and actually got it pretty far along before I was transferred over to a different arm of the empire (which is another story I'll tell when my NDA finally runs out).
Years later, I used some of the outtakes from one of the shoots to create a few of what I called my "Reflection" pieces, which were photos I distorted to the point that they became almost unrecognizable. I wanted to see if they would still carry some sense of their original meanings (which is why I used "loaded" sources with violence or nudity).
One of these pieces wound up resembling a sort of half deer/half woman chimera rooted in a fleshy substrate, which I thought was cool given the magical Arcadian vibe we'd been after in the original shoot. But, as always with my digital work, I wanted it to look more like a painting -- so in this version I slathered on plenty of digital painterliness.
Here's a detail (click to enlarge):
I’ve finally stopped working on — I hesitate to say “finished” — a big and complicated piece called “When He Becomes the Creator, Will He Let Us Exist?” (A line from the great X Ray Spex song “Genetic Engineering”).
As I’ve mentioned in a few past posts, this image is a “Hellscape” in the European tradition of Bosch's "Last Judgement" or Bruegel the Elder's "Dull Gret" — but it's actually based on an old book illustration I found many years ago of some geologists looking at the inside of a gigantic volcanic caldera.
My thinking about the piece as a whole revolves around the relationships between creativity and religion (God the Creator) and the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence - and with it, artificial artists. The central figure is this new AI Creator wielding a ceremonial paintbrush, which He waves in the air like a conductor, willing different scenes and scenarios into existence.
However, He isn’t the biblical Creator up in Heaven (we actually see a distracted Yahweh in the clouds at the top of the piece, dreamily reimagining His past Glories). Instead, this AI Creator is in charge of an underworld, in a direct nod to Harlan Ellison’s AM supercomputer in “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”. One other note: the Creator’s mask (see detail below) is a reference to a meme popular in AI circles, where HP Lovecraft’s “Shoggoth” monster wears a smiling fake face to cover up its terrifying underlying form.
When I came across it again in the late 1990's (see below for a pic), I was struck by the (hopefully) inadvertent racist connotations that had crept into it over the decades. Terms like "racial doom" and "black blight" certainly hit the ear differently than they would've in the 1950's, and the drawings of the butterfly people themselves reminded me of representations of East Asian people from popular Western culture of that time (without even mentioning the skin colour choice).
I restaged the image in 1999 as a photocollage using digital photography of toys and models, but the undercurrents of the source were mostly lost and I was never happy enough with it to bother finishing the background.
Time keeps on tickin' though. I came across the image again recently and thought how the theme of "racial doom" resonates even more strongly today, from the "Great Replacement" theories animating anti-immigrant nationalism across the world to the plummeting birth rates undermining everyone's retirement plans.
And needless to say, I'm also struck by images of scientists working to save us all at a time when multiple existential crises are erupting from our use of technologies (including AI, which powers the software I used to make this work).
With all this in mind, I made the new version more dramatic (and maybe a bit more Weimar Republic) by troweling on some Expressionist painterliness.
Like other images I've posted recently, this one is a reworking of a digital photo-collage/cgi/painting from long ago - 1999 in this case.
In those days I was experimenting with an inexpensive 3D figure rendering software called Poser which had all sorts of controls for changing a character's physique. Some of them could be cranked up to ridiculous extremes, which I loved because the results looked like "transhuman" superhero fantasies from the science fiction of the time.
For that first version of this piece, I created a cgi render and then collaged digital photos (taken with one of the earliest commercial digital cameras, a Sony Catseye) of myself and my newlywed wife Melissa into it. I imagined the resulting scene as the two of us surviving together romantically as impervious metal cyborgs in a post apocalyptic Eden, and I titled it "Super Love People."
As was usual in my digital work back then, I wanted the image to have a clear formal relationship with the history of Western easel painting (which is just artspeak for "I wanted them to look more like paintings") but I felt constrained by the inability of the tools at hand to do that very well. Instead, I kept it all in my back pocket while I puttered around with other projects for a few decades, waiting for better "painting" filters.
Better filters are here now, along with lots of other changes in digital imaging. Those advances have me feeling worried and melancholy, so in revisiting this piece my idea is less along the lines of an ironic wink at the silliness of our transhuman fantasies, and more about a posthuman future in which all of our fantasies are just something else's digital memories.
As with most of my "fine art" work, this is based on an "appropriated" or "found image" - in this case a jpeg photo of a woman from a pornographic website.
Like a lot of artists my age (ie, no spring chicken) I was deeply influenced by the work of Marcel Duchamp and well as his later followers in Pop art and most especially the "Picture Generation" Neo-Conceptualist artists of the 1970's and 80's (Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, etc).
Like those artists, I've always been interested in how the meaning of an image is determined and how it changes over time and in context. "Style" and other formal qualities strike me as tools to be deployed to these ends, rather than as some sort of inner spiritual essence.
This particular piece started life in 2005, when I made hundreds of tests by downloading images and then running them through various combinations of Photoshop filters to see what would happen to them. Mostly there was nothing too interesting, but occasionally one would stand out by resembling or implying something new, as though its original meaning and associations had shifted somewhere else.
In the best cases, there was still a whiff of the older meaning in the piece, which I always liked. In the case of "Ayanna," I enjoyed the resulting confusion of sleazy/cheap/low/prurient with arty/abstract/classy/high-faluting, but I wished it looked a bit more "painterly" or "handmade" to really seal the deal.
In 2012 I made a number of silkscreen prints of the image, and painted onto them by hand to see if I could get what I had in mind. I liked the results but still didn't feel they went far enough (also, as I've mentioned before in other posts and places, I'm opposed to making precious original objects - for political reasons, dear comrades).
So, here's my latest stab at finishing the piece, with "Expressionist" painterly effects created digitally, in a nod to the disruptive and troubling styles of artists such as Emil Nolde and Edvard Munch.
