BWith images from the AI generator, a new attitude towards reception quickly developed. At least for those viewers who have played around with Midjourney, Stable Diffusion or Dall-E themselves, machine images arouse curiosity as to what the underlying prompt might be, the text that is entered when the images are generated. Which term was style-defining, which combination was decisive for the aesthetics, which models exactly is the AI trying to reproduce? And with which program were they generated?
In the case of the “Life in West America” series by Finnish artist Roope Rainisto, the answer could be something like this: “Two women standing next to each other holding drinks, colored photo by Ed Ruscha, 70ies, America, societal despair, detailed, Leica , 35 mm”. Or “A car sitting in the dirt, in the style of William Eggleston, american realism, 1970s, velvia”. Or: “Man in an office full of copy machines, colored photo by Robert Frank, featured on tumblr, lowbrow, Kodacolor”. Rainisto’s photorealistic images are reminiscent of the shots taken by famous American photographers in the 1970s, perhaps most closely to Stephen Shore’s style-defining everyday shots: neon signs at deserted intersections, motels and gas stations, parking lots and pools, front gardens, shop windows, cars and girls.
As if broken down by a virus
At first glance they seem like perfect imitations, like previously unpublished photos, in which one immediately recognizes the characteristic iconography: the light, the grain, the simultaneity of glamor and sadness. Until you notice, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, the small errors that are now familiar as a clear feature of current AI images: third arms and double heads, writing made of fantasy letters of a non-existent language, objects floating in the air and other physical abnormalities . The fascination that these images emanate from is also connected to another quality, to a strange suspicion. Somewhere in the novel weirdness that surrounds them, a dark secret seems to want to reveal itself, a collective unconscious, the dreams and trauma beneath the trivial surfaces. It is as if the American Dream represented by the images harbors a virus that is destroying them from within.
Rainisto, 43, has worked as a graphic designer for a long time, designing user interfaces for smartphones, working for Microsoft and Nokia, “like almost everyone in Finland at some point in time,” he says. In 2016 he co-founded a company for VR glasses, two years ago the mid-life crisis came. And the idea of trying out the then emerging AI tools for artistic purposes.
Whether Rainisto is a long-overlooked genius or just a man who had enough time for computer experiments at the right time remains to be seen. He’s not the only one who has discovered this form of image composition for himself, a genre that some call “post-photography”, others “AI art”. For the online gallery Fellowship, he has just curated an exhibition of ten artists who, like himself, are exploring the endless creative possibilities of image generators. Rainisto prefers to simply call himself an artist – which is perhaps the greatest provocation for many of his more traditionally working colleagues. For some, artificial floods of images like those produced by the Finn are not art at all; but their end.
The quirks are trained off
In any case, one has to give Rainisto’s work a certain historical quality. What makes his AI photos so interesting is that they found a very appropriate imagery for a very special moment. He describes “Life In West America” as a “time capsule collection” that captures a fleeting phase in the development of such generative models; a moment when they don’t yet function perfectly enough to completely hide their mechanics and when – just barely – a few glitches, a few cracks in the system, hint at previously undiscovered design principles.
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