After Wall
Then one day, I noticed a parallel between lenticular prints and the AI image generation tools I was using. Lenticular prints combine multiple images into a single surface, revealing them one by one as the viewer shifts perspective. AI image models work the same way, beginning with a field of random noise and refining it through successive stages until recognisable imagery emerges — a step-by-step journey from chaos to clarity. I had the idea to use lenticular printing to materialise the typically invisible processes of AI image generation. Milliseconds of digital creation stretched out in a tangible optical trick that unfolds as the viewer moves. This is where After Wall began.
Jeff Wall references and reimagines art-historical works in his staged photographs, like A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai) (1993). I extend this chain of inspiration through AI style transfer, transforming his balanced arrangements of human figures into fungal tableaux—mycorrhizal networks that mirror how AI itself operates. Just as the Wood Wide Web transfers nutrients between trees through distributed underground connections, AI facilitates collaborative creativity by enabling the flow, merging and transformation of ideas across networks. The photograph becomes substrate for organic proliferation: decay, regeneration, transformation. His compositional logic remains, but inhabited by entirely different life.
Each lenticular print in this series begins with a black-and-white depth map extracted from Wall's compositions—a kind of three-dimensional scaffold that defines form and spatial relationships without carrying texture or surface information. These maps render Wall's scenes as gradients of light and dark, with nearer objects appearing lighter and distant ones fading to black.
What's striking is how these depth maps resemble traditional film negatives: ghostly inversions of tone, spectral yet precise. The resemblance feels serendipitous, as if the technology were circling back to its own photographic ancestry. The negative—once a tool of reproduction—becomes a metaphor for translation, the meeting point between latent space and light-sensitive film. When I watch an AI image emerge, I see something akin to the birth of a photograph in the darkroom tray: an image surfacing from apparent nothingness, guided by invisible rules. The medium has changed; the awe remains.
Most encounters with AI-generated imagery skip over this middle ground entirely. We see a prompt box and a finished image, with nothing between. But the depth map exists precisely in that gap—a halfway image stripped of texture and surface, preserving only spatial form. The prompts act as decorator, guiding the model toward organic, fungal formations while the depth map maintains the underlying architecture. A chair can become a stump, but where masses sit and how they stack in space remains constant. Making this liminal stage visible and tactile demystifies the process, lifting the hood on the black box. Instead of AI as seamless magic—prompt in, image out—we see a tool working with information: structure extracted, then redecorated. The lenticular print lets viewers physically navigate between these stages, tracing the path from structural blueprint to fully realized image with their own movement.
The lenticular prints become souvenirs of this collaborative journey. Souvenir comes from subvenire—to come into mind again. These works are souvenirs not of destinations but of passages: the photographs, conversations, books, workshops, experimentations and algorithmic glitches that shape each image. The print becomes a time capsule of process—an embodied record of decisions and influences, co-authored between humans and machines alike.
Finally, the collaboration extends outward. From screen to sculpture, the work relocates into physical space that requires viewer movement. These prints insist on movement, tactility, and shared space—taking AI off the screen and into material exchange. They're an invitation to use AI not as an end point but as a starting place for material experiment and human connection. The technology becomes a prompt for curiosity rather than a replacement for it.