Geek alert! Artificial intelligence Midjourney flirts with Sir John William Herschel, in my contribution to World Cyanotype day.
Over the last month or so I have played around with an Artificial Intelligence called “Midjourney”. It can make images from keywords, seed images- or a combination thereof. The AI will produce four example sample images and you can select which one to base your next images on. Midjourney will then make four version of that, and so on, until something that resonates with you pops up. At every step, the images become more abstract, and more “dream like”
Hang on, not your photos? This is clearly not art!
There are a lot of controversy surrounding images created by artificial intelligence. Photographers are protesting and have banned AI generated images from photo contests - the AI Dall-E won an art contest causing a stir.
This controversy is the driver behind this series of prints, and I want to contribute to the discussion on what is real, what is fake and does it matter? In my photography, I visit abandoned places and I arrange a scene to tell a story with objects right there and available to me - which also in a sense is cheating.
Exploring the keywords “melted Clock in dark abandoned room” in a number of iterations,
In this image, I am exploring keywords like time, decay and abandoned places and have guided the AI through five or six iterations, picking one out of four images in every step.
World cyanotype day - cyanotype you say?
On the 24th of September, world cyanotype day- artists around the world celebrate a print technique from the previous century, invented by the famous mathematician, printer, scientist and photographer; Sir John Willian Herschel.
A Cyanotype is a print of an image produced by coating a paper with photo sensitive chemistry based on Iron compounds, placing a negative on top and exposing the sandwich to UV light. This is often called “contact printing”, and the size of the final print depends on the size of the negative.
The sandwich of negative and coated paper is exposed to UV light. When the chemistry is exposed to UV light it forms the pigment Prussian Blue in the paper.
This process for the name “blueprint- the technique was used to copy architectural and technical drawings well into the 1940s. I make a modern version of this chemistry, called “New Cyanotype”, invented in the mid 1990s by Mike Ware.
My contribution to World Cyanotype day 2022 is three series of three cyanotype prints, each limited to 10 copies with cyanotypes based on images from the Artificial intelligences Midjourney. The prints are made on heavy, 320gsm, textured Arches Platine paper, and come signed, numbered and carefully packaged.
The prints will only be available from the 24th of september to 1st of October.