A Dog Peacefully Sleeping on a Bed

This work invites the viewer to question themself on censorship and women’s objectification through the fail of AI to reproduce the painting from Gustave Courbet The Origin of the World. It consists on a display of 80 AI generated images.

A Dog Peacefully Sleeping on a Bed

This work invites the viewer to question themself on the societal hypocrisy in which women’s body is envisioned, through the fail of AI to reproduce the painting from Gustave Courbet The Origin of the World. It consists on a display of 80 AI generated images that are all supposed to be reinterpretations of the 1866 original painting. We can see the AI generated images gradually evolve from American country houses to disturbing human shapes, as the machine struggles to understand and replicate the subject of the painting : a woman’s genitals. 

The Origin of the World is one of the most censored painting from painting History. It depicts a woman’s genitals with a minimum of embellishment and with a gaze that is not intended to please or compliment the viewer in a certain way, unlike most of the paintings produced in this era. The painting is still highly censored today : it is almost impossible to find a reproduction of it on Google Images, and it is not part of the many other nude paintings included in the biggest and most used datasets, which are libraries of images designed to train text-to-image AI. 

Artificial Intelligence struggles to understand that the painting is depicting a woman’s genitals because the existing images in our society also lack of this representation, outside of a very sexually charged context, as most of them are designed to be viewed by males for their pleasure and for their advantage. The internet and art History are filled with naked female representation but very few allow the depicted woman to hold power and control over her own body. As AI highlights any society’s bias, it tends to reproduce this objectification of the female body, so any image of a naked woman that AI produces tends to be highly objectified and directed at a male audience, otherwise the image simply can’t exist. 

This display of AI generated images depicting country houses, feminine portraits, still-lives and indescribable subjects invite the viewer to question themselves on how the woman’s body is usually depicted in our society and how it is not, and to think about who benefits from censorship still today?

The title A dog peacefully sleeping on a bed is the description that is given of Courbet’s painting when using an other AI software designed to give accurate description of any image.

The hanging starts with an empty space to indicate this censorship and to tell the viewer that something is missing. 

Amélie Testenoire-Lafayette (1997, France) lives and works between Paris and Lausanne where she is finishing her master degree in photography at Ecal. Her work revolves around questions about identity and representation. This work is part of a bigger research around the impact of digital imageries on the representation of women.