This work was a direct result of being invited to write a letter from an ancestor 200 years in the future.
Writing that letter had a profound effect on me. I’m not sure the filmmaker really understands why. Through his invitation I reconnected with my own deeper creativity, recognising my deep looking, reflecting and thinking are important aspects of my work.
How I respond, my creative expression and where I find and place towards meaning. It opened me.
I reconnected through Joanna Macy’s work in a different way towards grief, awe, imagination gratitude and the true spiral of the work that reconnects, seeing with new eyes and going forth.
I thought about how language changes through time and wove this into the work.
How if this was remotely my ancestor they would be blended in ways unknown to me. Would their hair be still curley? Would they have a broad smile like I do? As they aged what would they look like? What ways would the weather impact them and how might their lifestyles have changed? What role would technology form in their lives? What kind of spaces and places did they live in.
For me drawing figuratively is something I can do and have done in the past, I’m not that interested in being able to draw people well so I don’t practice it and needless to same I’m not skilled in that. So when AI started to offer me opportunities I thought it interesting to explore.
But it took me a while to train the AI from throwing up western ideologies of women and develop a prompt that was more intersectional and represented women from a blended society. It took me even longer to train it to represent age well.
It’s been some time since I looked at these images or worked on them. I began sharing them and got an adverse response, so I stopped talking about them and stopped sharing them.
They feel like a punctuation, at the time I made them I was researching and exploring what LLM and GANS could do. I include then here as part of my futurist work good bad, right or wrong. I’d have never been able to create these images without technology of what’s called AI 2023 – 2025.
The technology has moved on a lot since then but I’ve stoped using the graphic prompts, the images have taken on a saccharine look and generic appearance.
Perhaps I will revisit this project at some stage.
I know that I love this futures me, I think I may live into this. This really does look like I’ve been to the future.
I’ve been thinking if I was to make time travellers costume my inspiration might begin here.
Roisin Markham 