_framed.webp "caravan (1536). Tim Murray-Browne, 2023")
I've just published Diffeomorphic Landscapes, an online version of my recently exhibited image series created by my customised AI model trained on my lifetime archive of photos.
I've come to see that pictures that are both in focus and out of focus from the car are like memories – certain parts are really clear and other parts are hazy. That's the thing that resonates for me in the landscape pictures; they reflect how the mind works. They're a metaphor for memory.
The above quote of Todd Hido, one of my favourite photographers, has been stuck to my wall for several years. He's talking about photos taken through the car windscreen with rain running down, like #6097 (which I also have stuck on the wall). The water blurs and defracts the view. As detail is lost, the atmosphere of place is deepened.
There was a time in my life where I thought I might become a photographer. Expressing my inner world by moving through the outer world, seeing, framing, capturing, selecting – it's a creative process that works for me.
It's a similar process to generate images with AI. Both make instant something that was previously time-consuming, which can lead to a glut of images that quickly lose value. In both, the challenge emerges of how to make these images actually carry the thoughts and feelings of the person creating them. My answer here has been to train my own AI, find my own ways to misuse it, and then select from a set of perhaps 5000 generated images. I chose the crop and frame for each image. Beyond that, they are unedited.
The photograph lies by taking a single instant of a dynamic world and presenting it as an image: a static, unchanging reality that we see again and again. It's one reason why photographing people is so difficult. AI lies by fusing many different instants into a static image of a single instant that itself never happened. Like a diaorama, it is in some sense truer in that it captures a broader range of the world even if – unlike the photo – it does not let us positively conclude any specific details of the world.
Much like the haziness of Hido's images, I find these AI generated images analogous to memory. Details nestle in a sea of vagueness.
My own memory is non-visual. If I close my eyes I can't bring to mind the things I saw a few seconds ago. I no longer seem to have a mind’s eye. Yet I can turn a corner in a forest and instantly realise I crossed in this particular neck of the woods four years ago. But then, I can have a conversation with someone at a party and ten minutes later I can't spot them in a crowd, even if I remember what we were talking about. When I'm awake, visual experiences only ever come from my eyes. When I remember and imagine, I feel narratives, places, sounds, relations, the motion of bodies, the weight and presence of objects.
My favourite from the series is Cosmic Insignificance Therapy (0112). Fragments of image tie through movement into a myriad of relations.
_framed.webp "Cosmic Insignificance Therapy (0112). Tim Murray-Browne, 2023")
The full image series can be seen in the online exhibition of Diffeomorphic Landscapes. Also on that page is a recording of the talk I gave at the opening, as well as a tidied-up transcript who prefer to read than listen.
Tim
Glasgow, 7 Apr 2024