Small Frame, Infinite Canvas

Exhibition of new work exploring AI through glitch, mysticism and personal memories

I’m excited to announce an upcoming solo exhibition Small Canvas, Infinite Frame.

South Block Gallery, Glasgow
1–23 December 2023 (Mon-Fri 9am-5pm)

Artist Talk and Opening:
Friday 1 Dec, 6pm - 9.30pm (RSVP via Eventbrite)

My first solo gallery show! My first print show! Physical media! Lots to talk about. But I’m deep in the reeds… For now, here’s my text for the show.

SMALL FRAME, INFINITE CANVAS offers an alternative perspective on generative AI through creative coding, glitch and personal memories.

Each image is generated from a single customised AI. I trained the AI to imagine new memories based on my lifetime archive of 25,000 photos. It has only seen what I myself saw at one point and felt moved to record. The images it generates echo my visual world: Scottish landscapes, tree branches criss-crossing under the sky, rock textures from Cornish beaches and the contours of the human body. (I excluded photos of other people’s faces, but kept many close up studies of the human body.)

The range of photos I’ve taken are more diverse than this AI was designed to handle, so it struggles to make its creations ‘lifelike’. Artefacts appear revealing its own endless world of algorithmic creation.

I modified the AI to expand its frame, creating ever larger images that bring these hidden glitches to the foreground. Each image here contains a small square frame near its centre. As we move away from that optimised frame, the image disintegrates into an endless canvas of offcuts and mathematical building blocks.

Our relationship with AI is still fluid. In my mind, it jostles for contradictory roles: a tool, a collaborator, a pathological copycat, a new kind of mind – sometimes all these at once. The technology is racing ahead faster than my intuitions can.

A common approach to training AI is to harvest huge amounts of images off the web, aiming for a monolithic AI. When I began researching AI in 2018, I felt a strong instinct to train my own system using my own data in the safety of my own PC. If we all express ourselves through the same systems handed down from above, we will surely all find the same paths and end up saying the same things. I needed a way to make it my own, to fuse its world with mine.

In 2021, I stepped back from the overwhelming stream of new AI systems to dig deeper into what’s possible with this single AI I trained. In the years since, I’ve developed a relationship with it. As with many AIs, at first everything is overwhelmingly magnetic. Then it all starts looking the same. But then, after some time, some things emerge that resonate more deeply.

In making the leap to the physical world, I wanted to embrace the scale of the images. They combine detail and scale in a way that can be lost in the fluidity of digital display.

Created with support from Creative Scotland awarding funds from the National Lottery, Wasps Studios and Preverbal Studio. This work uses the StyleGAN3 AI model, developed at NVIDIA by Tero Karras, Miika Aittala, Samuli Laine, Erik Härkönen, Janne Hellsten, Jaakko Lehtinen and Timo Aila. Special thanks to Adriana Minu!

Tim
Glasgow, 16 Nov 2023