The Machine Recalls A Canon

For this little exercise in post-photography, I attempt to recreate iconic photographs using new artificial intelligence algorithms that generate images from text prompts, made possible thanks to advances in natural language processing models like GPT-3. These photographs were mediated through MidJourney, DALLE2, and Stable Diffusion's machine learning algorithms, they are entirely computer generated.

This series is dedicated to Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. In recreating the canon from digital scratch, we can consider the fragility of our collective memories, we can also reconsider the canon in and of itself. What deserves to be called forth back into existence and why?

These AI works can be seen as an absurd satirical meta-gesture towards art history, but these gestures also question the dynamics of erasure. What good is the homage or the meta-satire if the original is being disregarded? The last thing this series intends to do is to contribute to any disregard towards the works of Artists of Color or of Artists from the Global South. The ultimate goal of this project is to question the limits of AI as a privatized technology of appropriation and how this will affect the legacy of artists whose work were contained in the vast datasets used to train these AIs.