G-AI-DE

An artificial intelligence-generated, shot-for-shot homage to the seminal photobook, William Eggleston's Guide. An experimental body of work to stimulate thinking about new image-making technologies.

Inspired by Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Michael Haneke's facsimile remake of his own film Funny Games. This work uses Open A.I.'s cutting-edge text-to-image artificial intelligence system, Dalle-2, to remake William Eggleston's Guide photobook.

William Eggleston's Guide was released in 1976 by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, to coincide with their first ever one-person show of colour photography. Curatorially this was a radical decision when colour photography was viewed as the preserve of advertising and not fine art.

This experimental body of work pays homage to the original publication whilst raising questions of authorship, plagiarism, the relationship between text and image, and the impact artificial intelligence systems may have upon contemporary photographic practice.

In adopting a translator-like role for a black-box system my own short-comings and those of the A.I. are often writ large as I attempt to describe each of Eggleston's compositions to a machine. Where the resultant images show success in mimicking Eggleston's work the effect is unsettling and uncanny.

Vilem Flusser wrote that the invention of photography fundamentally changed the way in which we see the world. I posit the question that perhaps in the not too distant future artificial intelligence-generated images will be the final nail in the coffin of photography's truth claims.

This is an ongoing body of work and research.