The Future Doesn’t Look Like the Past and Joint Meeting of the Robots is a mini-series of digital prints that explores ideas of the future that we entertained in the past. A veritable playground for Surrealist methods and ideas. Both are set in a past-landscape featuring future-technology. Steampunk balloons float over a Boschian garden and robots roll through a Dali desertscape under their organic terra-formed glass space-pods. As I was playing with robots from the past, I ventured into the world of artificial intelligence, a surreal experience if there ever was one!

While continuing to work on the Cloud Machines series, I used combinations of my own drawings to customize the generative AI models and then generated new images. Scaffolding for the Sky and Sky Project: Piece One are unique additions to my previous series.

Thoughts on AI
Over the past two and a half years working with artificial intelligence, I’ve realized that AI and I have a lot in common. As an artist who works with found objects and chance elements, I also “scrape” the world around me for images and materials. Like AI, I rely on a kind of algorithm—mine just happens to be made up of my aesthetic instincts and intellectual curiosity. My “prompts” are the questions that guide each piece as it takes shape. When I use* different AI platforms, I often have to push back against their built-in algorithms, which tend to have biases and favour the popular or predictable, to carve out a space that reflects my own artistic concerns.

*AI insists that we are collaborating; I strenuously disagree.