AI

Inequality

I’ve been having some trouble figuring out how to photograph the scenes I had in mind for my Inequality project. When I learned about the Flux.1 image AI the other day, I decided to give it a whirl. I made several attempts at contrasting Jeff Bezos’ wealth, estimated at $200 billion in 2022, with that of the median Black family in America that year ($45,000). The above is the best one (I added the amount labels in Photoshop, as image-generating AIs are notoriously bad at text. Of course, this doesn’t really begin to show the actual scale of the gap. Below, a number of earlier attempts.

Next, I’ve photographed some bills on m own and will attempt to duplicate them in Photoshop more precisely to scale. We’ll see if that works…

Unreal

From the Barbara Kruger at the Serpentine we walked to the newer Serpentine Gallery North to see Refik Anadol’s Echoes of the Earth, an immersive AI animation based on visual data of coral reefs and rainforests. See more below:

One room featured beanbag chairs in which you could lie and gaze at psychedelic projections on the ceiling. Looks a bit like a Victorian opium den (click any image to see them all larger).

Zizi

Following up a recommendation from one of my tutorials, I went to see Jake Elwes’ Zizi Show at the V&A. While it was a dazzling video display, I’m not sure if it highlighted the inequities of trans representation in AI creation so much as simply the shortcomings of AI.