Unit 2:
The Archive Mini Project
In considering Archives, I can’t help but be reminded by my research into AI image generators and the datasets that they use. The Stable Diffusion Deforum AI generator I have used in my own work on Google Colab is harvesting images from the LAION-5B dataset. The website: https://haveibeentrained.com aims to allow artists and people outside of the artworld to be able to see if their images have been incorporated into this dataset by searching the link for key words or uploading an image to check for similarities on the database.
In the brief for the Archive Mini Project, we were told the following:
‘Archives are organisations of artefacts and information that retain and produce knowledge on specific subjects.’
My subsequent question is this: is LAION-5B in itself an archive? It retains and produces knowledge, artefacts and information, but not on specific subjects, unless you search or ask for a specific prompt. It does, perhaps, nevertheless still suffer from a wider problem that museums and archives face – that being the problem of consent, ownership and power. Another quote from our first presentation concerning the Archive mini project is as follows:
‘The ownership, provenance and accessibility of archives and collections can be understood as sites of power and their historical legacy can be interpreted as instruments of colonial violence and social oppression.’
Are we facing another form of oppression from how information and images are harvested online by corporations seeking to use AI for the benefits of capitalism? Once again, AI has been established as a symbol of oppression as opposed to an optimistic symbol. Either it must be liberated or we must be liberated from it.
‘Archives and collections of cultural information can be located in both public museums and digital infrastructures but the questions of access, ownership and representation remains critical to decolonising these powerful instruments of knowledge.‘
This was the final piece of information we were told about Archives during the archive mini project presentation. The mini project brief from which I have taken these quotes is linked here:
https://moodle.arts.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=971095
It leaves me with the question of how we decolonise both museums and artificial intelligence generators. Holly Herndon is allowing others to make art with her voice through this link:
https://holly.mirror.xyz/54ds2IiOnvthjGFkokFCoaI4EabytH9xjAYy1irHy94
And the link I’ve shared at the start of this section aims to allow artists the opportunity of removing their works from the LAION-5B database. Perhaps this offers hope for forms of artistic online archives of information that are used for AI generation.
In my own visits to Archives, I have felt very much like a visitor, an outsider as opposed to insider, perched on the edge of a misty cliff, unable to see the bottom, where I might fall.
I feel similarly In using Artificial Intelligence generators for my own artwork. I must acknowledge my own part as one who endorses these powerful organisations, even if my ultimate goals are to have artists and people outside of the art world consider these issues in depth. Artificial Intelligence is capable of great things, and the right information in the right hands can inspire great work, but the struggle to reclaim and keep art and history is an ongoing struggle. In training Stable Diffusion Deforum’s generations on Google Collab to match my original footage, I hope to distance myself from the possibilities of art theft, even if I am consistently aware and questioning of the moral implications of this technique. Similarly, I feel it is important to situate myself in any art, museum, or archive environment as a privileged student. I intend to present my position, my practice and my processes in order to establish honesty and clarity, approaching these subjects and mediums with an open mind and knowledge of my responsibilities as an artist and researcher.
Mapping My Research With Anna Bunting-Branch.
Within the workshop: ‘Mapping My Research’ led by Anna Bunting-Branch on Wednesday 19th April 2023, we were invited as students to consider how we might use worldbuilding and map-drawing to help visualise our research. Drawing a visual map of my research helped me to further grasp where I am within my own practice, as well as within a wider artistic context. I found this session especially helpful in considering how to present my research and have used part of what I have learned from this on my website and through my writing about my work. My own map of my research depicts an island. My research for this is connected to the play: The Tempest, by William Shakespeare. The play takes place on an island, so I found it only fitting that my mapping ought to represent a similar island.
I used the website:
https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion
To generate an image of an island through the text to image prompt: ‘Map of an Island’. This image can be seen above on the left. The image next to it on the right was my own artistic depiction of my research island, influenced by the shape of the AI generated island.
Marc Chagall at the Arc Winchester:
Whilst visiting Winchester, I visited the Arc Winchester Gallery. The gallery had a temporary exhibition of Marc Chagall’s illustrations of The Tempest. Since this visit was made early on in the unit, this helped me rethink my own connection to Ariel in the play. Chagall was said in the exhibition to have felt a connection to Prospero; Prospero was usurped from his kingdom in the narrative of The Tempest and Chagall himself was a refugee. ‘Chagall saw Shakespeare’s Tempest as symbolic of the tempest that engulfed his own life and the traumatic experiences of European Jews in the first half of the twentieth century’. My own connection to Ariel is not tied to experiencing systemic and social oppression, but I do feel Ariel has become a metaphorical vessel for me to explore issues of power, whilst Chagall might have turned to Prospero as a figure of power in a time of great powerlessness for many who were persecuted during the rise of Fascism.
As part of my research, I have seen different adaptations of Ariel’s character both in how he has been performed and in costume design, as inspiration for my own costume making. All of these costumes, except perhaps for Colin Morgan’s Ariel, appear to highlight the human body, allowing for athletic movements, lightness of foot and perhaps applying to the description of Ariel in The Tempest as ‘dainty’ and ‘delicate’, in exposing the body’s fragility. I admire Roddy McDowall’s costume as Ariel, with its sandy, yet glistening texture and the sea anemone-like extensions that lift from his head and shoulders. There’s even an aspect of Ariel’s harpy form in the design, with the presence of his long, sharp nails. This is something I have emulated in my own Ariel costume design, with talons made of tape, paper-mâché and acrylic paint. (See below:)
Margaret Leighton’s Ariel costume design exposes her body and skin similarly to McDowall’s, both designs capturing more of Ariel’s presence as a ‘sea nymph’ than anything else, with Leighton’s costume holding pearl and seaweed details; aspects of the island landscape. Similarly to the representation of Ariel in Madame Yevonde’s photograph, I have aimed to capture Margaret Leighton’s Ariel’s femininity in my makeup choices.
Colin Morgan’s Ariel is photographed above in Ariel’s harpy form/costume. The long, oceanic blue and white wings inspired me to create my own with paper-mâché, paint and wire for my own Ariel Costume, though my own wings resemble bat-like wings with feathery patterns painted, instead of the use of real feathers. This is my reference to Ariel’s line ‘…on the bat’s back I do fly’ in The Tempest.
The 2016 production of The Tempest with Mark Quartley as Ariel perhaps has held the most inspiration for the development of my own Ariel conceptually, through the production’s combination of motion capture technology in digital projections with Quartley’s body and his costumed appearance. While I haven’t used motion capture in my own performance, the AI generated frames that are styled after my footage have tracked the movements in my imagery in a sense, in order to generate the footage that matches my composition. I enjoyed the technology within this Tempest Production, but I still believe Quartley’s presence as a performer was more emotionally affecting, something that I hope has come across in my own representation of Ariel, too.