the prompt / the product / the prompt / the product 

Artificial Intelligence 

Hasui Kawase's 1936 print, 'Spring In Yugashima, Izu', conveys a sense of calm. The water appears peaceful and inviting. 

Located here in the centre of this screen, however, the reference to Kawase's tranquil scene is corrupted, and consumed by the setting that surrounds it. 

Through this corruption, 'Still Waters' seeks to explore whether art viewed on a screen can be free of the issues that digitisation may bring. Does viewing art on paper, on canvas, differ categorically from viewing art formed from pixels? Is something human lost, or is the human changing?

Still Waters 

Hopper painted 'Soir Bleu' in 1914, after returning to New York from Paris. It depicts a range of individuals, each apparently from different social worlds, cut off from one another. In the centre sits a clown, wearing the stock outfit of “Pierrot.” It is possible to read in this clown a certain reflection of Hopper himself - stubbornly committed to realism, despite the growing popularity and success of European abstraction. It perhaps expresses a sense of hopeless identification with a supposedly dying craft. Translated here into 'The Internet's Clown', the central figure takes on the role not of the realist artist, but the digital artist. It does so to ask how digital artists position themselves in relation to the wider art world; do they see themselves isolated and rejected, like Hopper's clown in 1914, or, with full knowledge of Hopper's development and the rebirth of realism, see the clown and themselves as on the cusp of something greater.

The Internet's Clown

_____has your screen
___ ever
______cracked?

The Cultural Logic of Web3 Production

A digital painting, made from an acrylic on canvas.

The original acrylic painting has been destroyed and burned.

Polaroid photos of the destruction of the original, as well as a tin of its ashes, will be sent on the collection of the digital artwork.  

The Falling of the Waves 

A scene from a dialogue that does not stop.

18:08

Pixel-painting GIF  
5 frames 
1000 x 1000 pixels  


The Feast 

RJ16848519

The partner piece to 'KamibashAI Bridge' - an original shin-hanga style pixel print, produced through reference to an AI output.

New Blossoms 

New Screens

Paula Rego was born in Lisbon in 1935. As a child, she grew up under the fascist regime of António de Oliveria Salazar. Raised by resolutely anti-fascist parents, Rego went on to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she began an artistic practice set upon highlighting the injustices of the Salazar regime, and those suffered by women in particular.

Rego's 1987 painting, 'The Policeman's Daughter', deals symbolically with these themes of oppression. In it, a strong woman, dressed in white, is depicted polishing the black boot of a policeman - presumably her father's. Her possession of the boot, however, and her penetration of it, perhaps suggests an inversion of the dynamic of power between the masculinist symbol of the state and the lone woman. 

'The Policeman's Daughter' is reworked here in 'The Internet's Daughter', wherein the black boot is replaced with a laptop. Through this substitution, it asks how power might operate in art today, but also, how it might be resisted.


The Internet's Daughter 

Signing In

The Ashes

09:47

Conversations

Market Value  #4

Market Value  #5

Market Value

Untitled 2 

Untitled 1 

I Am Online

David Hockney (1937 - present) is an English painter and draughtsman. His most recognisable works are perhaps those that contributed to the development of Pop Art through the 1960s. 'Spectral Hockney' is based upon a series of paintings Hockney made during this period, while living in California, each of which centre around a swimming pool. The copy of the work here features iconic details of such paintings, including modern housing and a splash of water, though this particular piece never existed. 

Spectral Hockney 

John Register (1939 - 1996) was an American realist painter, best known for his sparse depictions of everyday spaces, devoid of human presence. 'Spectral Register', as with many of his works, focuses upon an empty chair and the fall of light, though, is a copy of a painting that never existed. 

Spectral Register 

Spectral Pastiches

Mondrian's Desktop #7

“Ultimately, however, the artist no longer needs a particular point in nature in order to achieve an image of beauty. As the universal becomes more conscious in him because the individual has lost its dominating influence, from this greater consciousness he spontaneously creates equilibrated relationships – complete harmony – the goal of art. He has then assimilated outwardness into himself: thus it remains within him – to move him. Piet Mondrian, ‘Nature, Reality and Abstract Reality’, 1920.

In the early 1920’s, Dutch artist Piet Mondrian began to explore grid-like structures in his paintings. Works such as “Tableau 1’ (1921) marked a shift away from the representational form that had defined his career to this point, and precipitated a movement towards an austere minimalism of lines, rectangles, squares and primary colours. This development was one motivated by a desire to reject the individual – understood as specific, local representation - and instead, to capture a sense of the universal through an embrace of the fundamental language of line and colour. For Mondrian, this was the purpose of art – to express ‘the beauty of life’ through connection with the essence of the universal.

‘Mondrian’s Desktop’ situates these notions in the digital age of the 21st century. By transforming Mondrian’s grids into the windows of a desktop, it seeks to ask whether the desktop itself can contain beauty - whether the windows of a desktop might present us with something of the universal language of line and colour, removed from specific representation, and through such reduction, gesture to the universal; or, more figuratively, whether the window of the browser itself might today represent a window to a form of the universality Mondrian originally sought, one now found in the borderless world of the internet.

A curated output of 64 editions, made in P5js.

Mondrian's Desktop #8

Mondrian's Desktop

Mondrian's Desktop II #4

Mondrian's Desktop II #11

Mondrian's Desktop II

After 'The Raft of Medusa', Théodore Géricault (1818-1819)

1000 x 683 pixels
5 frames 

Shipwrecked 

After 'Ophelia', John Everett Millais (1851-1852)

750 x 1000 pixels
5 frames 

Drowned 

THE DEEP WATERS OF THE WEB

In the aftermath of WWII, western culture has been largely shaped by the rise of consumerism and the proliferation of mass media.  Television and film brought corporate visions of reality into homes while, at the same time, suburbanization fueled the automobile’s new prominence.

Artists like Andy Warhol and writers like J.G. Ballard reflected on these changes, suggesting that the technological advancements of the period were ushering in new and troubling relationships with death and destruction.  Warhol’s *Death and Disaster* series used car crashes to highlight society's desensitization to violence, while Ballard’s novels, such as *Crash*, linked the car to darker, sexualized death drives.

Today, with the rise of generative AI, we face another technological shift. *Crash* echoes Warhol’s themes but focuses on derealization, questioning what happens when art, history, and technology collide crash.

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