After Wall
The practice has shifted. Not just because of AI—circumstance, fatherhood, mentorship, a million accidents all feed it—yet AI cracked something open. It's a catalyst. A tool that enables further experimentation, deeper curiosity.
Most people can't see past the slop. They see encroachment, adversary, replacement. They've bought the myth that AI is auto-magical, that it does everything for you. I think it shouldn't replace your mates or make your art for you—if it does, the work's dead on arrival. The question isn't efficiency. It's depth. Play harder, not faster.
AI, in this light, is the blooming of a new, machinic intelligence: not artificial but additional, a new node in an expanding ecology of creative exchange. If creativity operates as an ecosystem rather than isolated genius, what can an image be? Not a singular capture, but iterative, mutable, collaborative: a substrate for transformation rather than an endpoint.
Photographic canons are being questioned, expanded and dismantled. Jeff Wall's photographs offer a useful starting point to consider the instability of the image and the instability of discourse. Thinking about chains of reference, I am attempting to loosen their grip by folding Wall’s work into wider networks where they refuse to settle into fixed meaning.
I begin by replacing Wall's human-centric arrangements with fungal blooms—organic forms evoking decay, regeneration and transformation. The inspiration comes from mycorrhizal networks, what biologists call the 'Wood Wide Web': forest ecosystems linked through microscopic connections. Just as fungi enable trees to exchange resources, AI facilitates the flow and evolution of artistic ideas. This move toward fungal ecologies repositions authorship as distributed rather than singular: a node within a constellation rather than an endpoint in a lineage.
By transforming these images into lenticular prints, I aim to make aspects of the process visible, demystifying AI so it returns technology to the realm of tools rather than myth. I collected ridged, kitschy lenticular cards from gift shops for years before noticing their parallel to AI image generation. Both combine multiple stages into a single surface – lenticulars reveal images as you shift perspective; AI models refine noise into clarity through distinct stages.
Most encounters with AI skip the middle ground. We see prompt and finished image, nothing between. The depth map exists in this gap. Each lenticular print begins with a black-and-white depth map, extracted from Wall's compositions, a computational rendering that measures form and objects’ spatial distance to the camera lens. Resembling film negatives, the technology circles back to its photographic ancestry, a metaphor for translation.
This work becomes a souvenir of collaborative journeys: images, conversations and experiments shaping my practice. The lenticulars relocate AI from screen to sculpture, into physical space that requires viewer movement—an invitation to use AI not as endpoint but as starting place for material experiment and human connection. Technology becomes a prompt for curiosity rather than replacement for it.