Nothing Ventured…
I decided that I would submit some of my work for the new ‘Contemporaries Art Exhibition’. I chose my latest installation piece called ‘The Balance of Power – Unity in Bits’. I think that this is possibly one of my strongest pieces out of the three I selected. I’m really keeping my fingers crossed for this one. I also chose my ‘AI Gets Political’ digital art piece and finally the augmented reality animation of my ‘Urban Alchemy’ Book.
The Balance of Power – Unity in Bits
The Balance of Power Mobile is a complex piece and it has meaning on many levels. At its simplest it is a structure that moves very gracefully and is calming to watch. At its most complex it has many hidden layers detailed below:
- The mobile comprises 11 lines of individually hand drawn elements that represent the ones and zeros of binary code.
- The binary code represented in the mobile spells the words ‘Unity in Bits’. It is a visual metaphor representing how our society is ultimately fractured by computers and their code. For example the harms of social media and the taking of artist work without permission.
- At least 10 of the mobile’s elements contain hidden messages from artists regarding their thoughts and feelings surrounding AI art. Their thoughts are hidden in this way because in terms of AI art generation they were never asked about the taking of their work without permission.
- Finally the piece asks the question – can our Unity be found in the ‘bits and bytes’ of a computer program? In order to fully access the augmented reality from a distance people need to come together in pairs. Although the augmented reality can be accessed by an individual the higher mobile elements need to be zoomed in on. One person needs to zoom in on an element while another augments from zoomed image. This again is a metaphor for us (humanity) coming together to solve the looming issues regarding AI and especially for artists AI art.
The Balance of Power (Unity in Bits) from Karyn Easton on Vimeo.
Politics Through the Lens of AI
The second choice for my entry was ‘Politics Through the Lens of AI’. This piece was created by recording all of the light from individual party political broadcasts in one single long exposure image. This image was then fed through an early version of a text to image generator. No texts prompts were given to the AI algorithm and the results were left entirely up to the Ai. The results were quite revealing.
Urban Alchemy – An Exploration of Barcelona’s Graffiti
Urban Alchemy is part of a series of three books that uses Barcelona Grafitti as the basis for some of its designs. The book was then animated and augmented so that as a phone is passed over the designs in the book they come to life.
Urban Alchemy – An Exploration of Barcelona’s Graffiti from Karyn Easton on Vimeo.
