Manipulated and stitched AI / Machine Learning generated images. 2020 - 2022.

This, like much of my work, is an exploration of perception – of imperfections, and information lost and found. I train the machine with limited data – of photos of Susan’s woven darns – in order to explore how it perceives the world. It is then, through the errors and imperfections of what it creates, that we ourselves can perceive that the machine’s knowledge is incomplete, and perhaps that the underlying technology is imperfect.

Yet what is there for us to discover? Much in what the machine creates is invisible to us. And so, by further manipulating the machine-generated images, I create works which attempt to reveal features that may be obvious to the machine, but were previously invisible to us.

In this collaboration with Susan it sometimes feels that she is mending the holes in data, the information gaps maybe even in the machine’s perception. As she reworks the manipulated images, transferring them to physical stitching, a new perception of what’s there, or what might be there, begins to emerge. In her stitching we may see all new elements of the machine generated images, a mending of the perceived and unperceived gaps in knowledge, our own and the machine’s.

This project is a collaboration with Susan Yelavich.

This essay accompanied the exhibition “Echo Chambers” at 1053 Gallery, Fleischmanns, NY, USA.

“Echo Chambers,” 1053 Gallery, Fleischmans, NY, USA