The Reflective Machine (Choi 2019) is a ‘neural painting’ using an AI convolutional neural network to algorithmically -and agonistically- manipulate and blend natural world derived style palettes with technical imagery I capture in my “compositional journeys” around the image space of the work. In this series I am exploring the algorithmic retelling of a narrative reflecting on the aesthetic sublime of environmental collapse, the frayed threads of famine, disease, war, all watched over by “machines of loving grace” (Brautigan 1967), suggesting that opaque mediation enters an illusory world of optimized truths where a picture’s information sources are “not always identical with its subject matter” (Newall 2011, 61-65). The associated paper (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14702029.2022.2069917) explores the emergence of these themes in terms of a reflective look back at the metaphors of situated praxis found in the Abstract Expressionist painters of the New York School – a time before the computational mediation of creative intention.
Newall, Michael. 2011. What is a picture? Depiction, Realism, Abstraction. Palgrave Macmillan.
Suk Kyoung Choi 