The images in this first gallery were generated using Stable Diffusion, a kind of open source generative AI. In their way, they depict the complex and overwhelming confluence of aesthetics resulting from models trained on billions of text/image pairs, a biased and limited but nonetheless vast summary of visual culture created to facilitate the synthesis of new images. The images in this gallery operate under a synthetic banner, combining art historical, technical and physical elements to address the nature and impact of this novel medium.

The images in this second gallery were created using Substance Designer, essentially a texture creator for games and vfx that I use as a way to build images from simple rules. Each image is created procedurally, meaning they follow a series of steps modulated by the randomness of mathematical noise to arrive at different but similar results. Imagine the node trees behind them, how each element might have been created from primary shapes, color wheels, masks and distortion.

The images in this final gallery were made using 3D rendering software like Blender and 3D capture techniques like photogrammetry in a style foregrounding the artifacts and idiosyncrasies of the digital approximations of our world on which we increasingly rely.