Beyond the Boundaries – Six Centuries

Boundary: a line that marks the limits of an area; a dividing line

Having boundaries: emotional, physical, and psychological

Frontier, rules or limits, fixes a limit

In relation to the digital – where are the boundaries?

This group exhibition marks the end of Stage Two of my MFA, unfortunately the physical show was cancelled but the work will be shown virtually. The title gave me lots of room for development and felt like a perfect fit in relation to how my work had been developing over the summer. It brought up a number of ideas in relation to working outside of the frame, breaking the norms, and links to the afterlife. It suggested to me work that was both temporally and physically beyond a boundary, in the way that the digital connects me with the ghosts in the machine.

I always had a triptych in mind, probably because I work a lot in that format and the symbolism works – past, present, future; beginning, middle, end etc.  I also wondered about a snaking, flexible book form a bit like that I used for ‘Singularity.’ I wanted the work to physically be outside of the frame in some form.

I also decided to work with still life as the inspiration for the content and that took me back to some of my early influences, the work of the female still life Dutch painters. Apart from the obvious attractiveness of their work I have always been intrigued by these women because I imagine them building their practice against the odds. They were painting at a time when women were consigned to the lower orders of painting and generally required the permission of men to develop their practice.

I worked with Machine Learning (ML) based on the works of the Dutch women as a training set. This produced some promising results, but I didn’t feel it was quite resolved so focused in on Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) as painter whose work has a particular quality and tends to be less well known than the likes of Clara Peeters, Judith Leyster, and Maria Oosterwijck. That said Ruysch was unusually successful in her era.

I then created a new data set based purely on Ruysch’s images that I found on the web. I also took some of my own floral still life photographs based on Ruysch’s work. At that point the thinking was to have the three images side by side – Ruysch’s, mine and the machine.

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For the exhibition I wanted to heighten both the lusciousness and the uncanny, unnerving elements of the images. Following more research about women as artists I came across an article on Theorem Painting, which is the art of stencil painting on velvet that was practised by Victorian women. I then decided to have the three final images printed on velvet. Apart from anything textiles and computation have a connection dating back to the original Jacquard looms.

The intention was to mount the velvet pieces on boards to be hung on the gallery wall without matts or glass. In another world I would have liked to invite the viewer to touch them, to run their hands across the softness of the fabric, shifting the light and the pigments and in so doing touching the past, present and future. This was also to be an element of breaking another boundary – the gallery as a space that is so often ‘look but don’t touch!’

In addition I was going to add three QR codes under the three large images, this would bring the experience of our digitality and entanglements into the piece. On holding their phones to the QR codes the visitor would be taken beyond the physical presence of what was in front of them to a Zine, more background on Ruysch, or the latent space video generated by the ML process. I am obviously disappointed this has not been possible but hope it is something I can test out in future.

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After some reflection I decided to work with just the ML generated images as they contain elements of Ruysch and me. They also start to point to the future. What happens when the machine gains autonomous creativity?

…if machines become conscious, then the ability to share stories might save us from the horrors of the world of AI often depicted in our scenarios of a future with machines. (Du Sautoy, 2020: 305)

As ever in writing up the development of an exhibition piece or project there’s a danger of it appearing a neat and linear process. My process is anything but that, I often start with a mind map and set out lots of ideas, they take me all over the place. I get feedback that surprises, deflates, or inspires me. I do some reading, make some images, attend some talks, make work that’s completely unconnected, and all the time the ideas are percolating. It can be a walk in the woods (as I found last year!), waking in the night, or watching a sci fi film that then prompts a new direction. In this case it was gazing back and forth across the centuries.

References

DU SAUTOY, M. 2020. The Creativity Code: Art and Innovation in the Age of AI, Harvard University Press.