Photographs of British Algae - AI Impressions

Inspired by the photography pioneer, Anna Atkins, artist Craig Ames utilises AI imaging technologies to create new visual forms that explore the relationship between the real and the artificial.

Utilising one of the cutting-edge imaging technology of the day, the English botanist and photographer, Anna Atkins, created the world's first photobook and photographic-based record of botanical specimens. Celebrated for its historic significance and artistic merits, her self-published Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843-1853), has gone on to inspire innumerable mimetic images.

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) image generation is perhaps the most transformational imaging technology currently being developed and employed. Adopting Atkin’s philosophical approach to image-making, Ames utilises this emerging technology in the pursuit of rendering specimen exemplars of 'AI impressions'.

Working from a broad sample of the specimens Atkins originally rendered, Ames repurposes their Latin names to create instructional 'prompts', which were processed through a text-to- image AI image generator. The resulting fabrications were labelled and catalogued to create a new visual taxonomy of simulated algae.

Additionally published and archived online to create a future machine learning feedback loop, the simulacra intentionally distorts the boundaries between the real and the artificial, highlighting the growing disconnect between the natural world and the simulated hyperreality that increasingly subsumes it.