A selection of recent work drawn from my The Drowned World series. This series mixes personal journaling with extracts from dystopian and hopepunk narrative to offer an anticipatory aesthetics of possible futures.
The work was originally evolved from my oil painting below:
The images below are generated through and evolving combination of original paintings, textual exerts from the novel The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard, my own writings, and a process of text- and image-to-image AI synthesis.
SK Choi, The Golden Hours, 2023, Txt2Img (left), Img2Img (right)
I want to begin an imaginary exploration of possible worlds, mapping out future vistas falling between the imagined (constrained by potentiality) and the virtual (artificial representation), traveling en plein virtualité into the imaginary waterscape of the Anthropocene. Somehow, Maxfield Parrish and Joseph Mallord William Turner have joined me and the lizards in the foggy, misty, golden hour of a dystopian sunset.
SK Choi, The Drowned World, 2023, Txt2Img
SK Choi, Inferno series, 2023, Img2Img
The Anthropocene era is the historic, and seemingly passing, “age of humans” during which we have deposited a discernable trace of our presence in geological strata –carbon, nuclear isotopes, and now increasingly, the detritus of an environmental senescence we continue to fabricate.
SK Choi, The Golden Arches, 2023, Img2Img
I explore this space to ask whether the self-referential technical memory-images of our day might reflect forward into the time of the last painting, bookending the ochre-stained cave walls at the beginnings of human expression with the silicon etchings of extinction.
SK Choi, Bric-à-brac, 2023, Img2Img
Whose bricks these are I think I know. The image of virtuality is produced in collaboration with “a plethora of nonhuman agents” (Zylinska). The ontological constraints of AI art therefore demand an ethical response to the virtualization of the environment, a questioning of the assumptions behind the intimate entanglement of awareness and apparatus. If the apparatus is a fusion of computational and natural, where is the division, how do we know?
SK Choi, Main St. Diner (above) & The Last Bridge (below), November 2023, Img2Img
A painting of an evening scene, inner city, downtown east side, channeling Edward Hopper, but he left early. Computational technologies managing contemporary society have massively proliferated the spread and speed of spectacle, bringing information and misinformation in unknown measures. Who dines in the n-dimensional booths of the main street diners of the world?
The combination of the human voice (text) and the gesture of the hand (painting) intersect in the serendipitous crossing of the bridge of virtuality. I’m particularly drawn to images that show the trace of my presence in the process. The image of the future is already the image of the present.
SK Choi, Channel lights (left) & Crossing Hopper St. study (right), November 2023, Img2Img
I was struck by the look of wet concrete after rain at sunset, so I play with the poetics of the description and the machine carries the harmony, often in surprising ways. Text to image is jazz painting.
The act of painting is simultaneously a construction and a destruction, a putting down and taking away, trying to restore balance to the disrupted surface. Here I was exploring the manipulation of digital brushstrokes to attempt to generate something that felt as if the surface had been touched by physical brushes. Attempting to teach my way of mark-making to an unfeeling black box.
The mind has been categorized as a machinic-computational unit. But we cannot build a human mind that is cut off from a lived body. In these works, I explore that existential dichotomy.
SK Choi, Lily/Lilith, 2022, VQGAN+CLIP
VQGAN+CLIP is another implementation of AI text-to-image technology. In these images I am exploring the affective properties of virtual light, and its play across the artificial textures of water, earth, and emergent lifeforms. These images use excerpts from a dream sequence in Ballard’s The Drowned World with my hand painted work responding to those sequences, as keys to enter that world.
SK Choi, Home on the Range (top two) & Fortress series (bottom two), 2022, VQGAN+CLIP
“Where the brick houses and single-story factories broke water surface, giant forests reared up into the burning dull-green sky, smothering the wheatfields of the temperate zones.” (Ballard)
Suk Kyoung Choi 