The images in this first gallery are made with Stable Diffusion, a set of open-source generative tools and models for making and editing images. They are synthetic images that directly address their synthesis; new things arising from the juxtaposition of old things. One series depicts structures of trash that recall canonical works of art, combining objects on the polar extremes of value and impact. Another series depicts objects combining physical and electronic elements into surreal, sculptural compositions that bring concrete and polygons into a unified space. These images explore the complex and overwhelming conceptual and aesthetic potential of models trained on billions of text/image pairs, a distillation of the internet’s visual culture. They engage directly with the novel constraints and affordances of generative AI.
The images in this final gallery are 3D renders featuring meshes created with 3D capture techniques like photogrammetry that have been structured into traditional compositions. Their obvious digital distortion represents the inevitable loss resulting from translating objects into reductive, computational representations.
