Project Statement
— An Ambiguous Place
An Ambiguous Place is a collaboration and exploration between humans and Artificial Intelligence. Founders Corrigan and Pritchard placed this first project at the intersection of philosophy and metaphysics, probing Dall-e daily with prompts to explore these topics while synchronously making images using conventional photographic methods to answer the same call. At every juncture, the three collaborators were in conversation, sliding between worlds -between human form and technology - pursuing individualized truths of future selves and worlds in an innocent, childlike play state without prejudice.
The project asks if AI is programmed by humans and modeled on the sum of human imagery, wouldn't any work product reflect a broader understanding of ourselves and a provocation for our shared future? Their transcendental questions of reality and existence explore an intimate and abstract synthesis of humanity in imagery and words. Embedded is the underlying question of whether photography is an undeniable truth, a creative human expression, or objective mechanical documentation, an argument waged and revisited since photography's inception. It remains to be seen, but this latest iteration may have higher societal stakes.
The idea of the "artist's touch" has long been complicated by aides, both human and machine, deputized to fabricate on behalf of the primary creative, whether artist apprentices in the 18th and 19th centuries or in the robust studio system present in major contemporary artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. These advancements liberate artists from pure factual representation and allow them to focus on experimentation with color, light, movement, figuration, substance, context, and dimensionality, strengthening work output in the artistic field. By supplying DALL-E with an idea for an image via their prompts, Corrigan and Pritchard's An Ambiguous Place project situates itself within this lineage in art history by taking the latest technology tool and using it as a creative collaborator.
AI is central to the cultural zeitgeist, inspiring curiosity and questions of morality, fear, and anxiety- resonant with warnings of its negative societal impact. We believe the truth will fall somewhere in the middle, an ambiguous place by definition and a question best answered through Art. As Bertolt Brecht said, "Art is not a mirror held up to society but a hammer with which to shape it."
— Aurora Wilder
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