‘the thought takes on the form of flesh’

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My image is grounded in an ecological issue local to my home in Western Australia: the near-extinction of the critically endangered, but hauntingly beautiful cryptid, the Arid Bronze Azure Butterfly.  

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This animal lives almost its entire life in the deep, underground colonies of a type of woodland ant species that has not yet been named by, and is thus not ‘known by’, science. Both the butterfly and the ant are so difficult to find that it is possible that both species have faded into silent extinction, due to the catastrophic deforestation that has occurred in their native habitats.

 

If discoveries had been made earlier about the insects’ reliance on precise configurations of eucalypt trees, would humanity have been able to save them? If we had been able to see the way the ants or butterflies see, would we have been able to track their dwindling numbers with greater efficiency? How can we appreciate these ecologically important animals without properly ‘knowing’ them? AI presents a new lens for us to ‘see’ and ‘envision’ parts of nature we might have previously dismissed.  

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At the same time, we need to redefine our relationship to AI generated outputs and images – they are not art, but they are also more than just a set of instructions. My practice envisions AI as oracle. I take a thread of my own, real artwork (a selection of words from a larger prose piece about AI, in this case the words ‘the thought takes on the form of flesh’), and without ‘prompt engineering’, ask the LLM for its interpretation. The result after refinement is a computer-generated vision that reveals a zeitgeist-esque interpretation of my prose - an exciting new way of seeing and envisioning the world.

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In my image, a man inputs instructions into a terrarium-like environment capsule for conservation purposes. The man’s thoughts about the butterfly, mediated by new technologies that help him understand it and its role in its local ecology, ‘become flesh, become real’.

 

The result is a ‘retrofuturistic’ vision that embodies an optimistic future for AI, a world where AI visions will help us see and appreciate the world around us, and will in turn help us create a better version of ourselves.