We see young people talking, smoking, contemplating - but what interests me are the interior spaces they inhabit, and accumulation of objects and details in these spaces. Some objects are placed on the wall-size shelves; others cover coffee tables, sofas and smaller shelves. In some cases we can easily identify these objects, but in other cases they are harder to identify. Some look like fragments, traces and shadows of the objects that are gone. Yes, these are “fragments” - but of what?
In ancient art museum we see material fragments of long gone civilizations. Pieces of vases and plates, metal tools, jewelry, tiny statues missing limbs or heads. These are real objects from 3000, 2000 or 1500 years ago. But AI “fragments” have diffident ontology. Generative AI model extracts structures and patterns from hundreds of millions of images and distributes them across trillions of connections. In this process, digital materially of images is further virtualized, evaporated, diffused.
I see the accumulations of objects, their shadows, and traces in this series as a metaphor for Generative AI process. Despite their illusionary materiality, the generated “fragments” you see are like scents, the invisible movements of air blown by the wind, or tiny broken shells left in the sand after a wave recedes back into the sea. These are fragments of fragments, deposits of already broken forms, the shadows or shadows…