83 Seeds From A Vanishing Mountain
This second collaboration with Sofia Crespo continues a shared investigation into experimental digital and analogue photography and their relationship to the natural world. The work exists both as a cyanotype installation of twenty-five prints and as twenty-five “slices” of the digital image from which the analogue works were produced. At first glance, the installation appears to depict a bouquet of flowers; on closer inspection, however, it reveals the strangeness and uncanniness characteristic of images generated through artificial intelligence. The flowers depicted are generative interpretations of plant species at risk of disappearing from the Swiss Alps as a result of climate change. Rather than aiming for scientific accuracy, the work adopts a speculative approach. Just as each instance of seed production involves subtle genetic recombination and the possibility of new traits, each “seed” in latent space generates a distinct variation of a plant. The eighty-three seeds used in the work - corresponding to the eighty-three species represented - produce images that differ in detail and form, suggesting both fragility and the potential for adaptation and change. Alongside the digital images, the cyanotypes undergo a bespoke process of weathering and toning that enacts a gradual, vanishing-like transformation. As the prints fade and change, they echo the slow, often unseen disappearance of species in the wild. Together, the digital and analogue elements hold evolution and extinction in tension, foregrounding both the speculative potential of generative systems and the material realities of environmental loss.
Process and Research
This work was produced rapidly with Sofia Crespo, as most of our collaborations are. It marked the first time we began deliberately experimenting with a work existing across multiple spaces and formats simultaneously. As a result, it is also our most fragmented piece. Online, the digital tiles have already begun to circulate independently as they are shuffled and recontextualised on marketplaces. Individual tiles now belong to different collections, while the cyanotype component has become physically separated from the digital work. Without significant coordination and goodwill, it would be difficult to reunite the piece in its original form. Fragmentation is a condition of the work’s existence. The piece also explores questions of scale and attention. The digital tiles are highly detailed, with elements that reveal themselves only through careful zooming. Yet as an NFT, the work is most often encountered at the scale of a browser window, where this detail is easily overlooked. In contrast, the physical installation operates at a much larger scale, but the printing process causes the fine detail to dissolve, producing a different kind of image altogether, creating a tension between intimacy and distance, resolution and loss. Underlying the work is also an interest in collage and its long relationship to image-making. Contemporary anxieties around AI-generated images as “unreal” echo much older concerns within the history of photography, from spirit photographs and fairy hoaxes to early techniques of cutting, layering, and compositing. Just as analogue photographers once manipulated images to construct desired realities, digital tools (Photoshop, but also machine learning) now do the same. We think of our use of machine learning as part of this longer lineage of image construction, artifice, and belief.
Exhibition Venues
References and Inspiration
Dissemination
The contract address is 0x788dC7d9B5C5d32f6b0F36FFEdAF7e78D7efFb52. Each of the 25 tiles were individually minted to allow for them to be reshuffled into new images on various resale sites. Each tile contains a copy of the original image in entirety its meta-data. The cyanotype is separate from its digital counterparts.