Unit 3
My playful utilisation of Brechtian performance techniques, alongside DIY prop and costume crafting is united with the ethereal presence of sophisticated AI generation technology in my art practice. My artwork shapeshifts from the fragile to the powerful, from the humorous to the frightening. I shapeshift along with it; embodying multiple characters through costume, makeup and multi-roling in live performances. When composing my own visual language, I edit and layer moving images together, including my footage of animals and landscapes, the edited visual records of my performances, and the fluid distortions created by Stable Diffusion AI video rendering of my footage. These moving images are then captured in shapeshifting stage sets, displayed with projection mapping.
I have explored the popularisation of contemporary AI technologies online by approaching AI systems as an artistic collaborator: co-devising my creative narratives with the help of Chat GPT and Stable Diffusion. I gather Chat GPT transcripts, edited extracts from Shakespearean narratives, and my own creative writing to script the foundation of my artworks. This collaging methodology has allowed for the assemblage of poetic parallels, in my most recent work, between the occult practice presented in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, and the contemporary landscape surrounding the usage of AI, today. The Jacobean beliefs regarding spirits and demons are additionally compared with the way we anthropomorphize contemporary AI models, through my research. The work contrasts anxieties circulating the development of AI technologies under hubristic, colonial and patriarchal influences with the whimsical, magical absurdities of machine thinking and learning.